Panasonic DMC-LX3: Set Manual Focus Function

The manual focus function allows you to manually focus the camera by using the quick menu joystick to guess the camera’s approximate distance from the subject. You can use the manual focus in the program mode or any of these more creative modes as well as many of these scenes located in the scene mode. You can’t however use it in the auto mode. The reason why you might want to use the manual focus is as if the camera’s having a hard time focusing in low light for example or on moving targets. So in this case I’ll use the program mode, I’ll move the focusing switch to MF for manual focus and back here I can use my quick menu joystick to move the manual focus meter up and down. So I can guess the approximate distance using this meter, I also getting magnified the view in the center as I’m moving the joystick to help me actually see whether the subject is in focus or not and that helps a little bit but I find that the meter is usually just fine. Sometimes it’s very hard to see whether it’s in focus or not using that center’s zoom in portion. Regarding the manual focus zoom in section in the center, you can see it here if I press the quick menu joystick up and down while it’s still active, I need to press my navigation buttons to move my focusing square over and then just press the quick menu button down to set that the I can continue moving my manual focus meter. The other option for the manual focus zoom is having the entire screen become zoomed in and that might make a little bit easier if you want to fill in the entire screen with the zoomed in portion, all you need to do is go into your main menu, go down to the set up tab by moving to the left, down and into the right and go down to page 3 of the menu. You can use your zoom lever to move over to the right, page 3 and then down to manual focus assist. Go down, press to right and choose MF2 press set, press set again to escape the menu. And you can see now when I zoom the entire screen fills in and this might make it even easier because the picture is so much larger to see whether it’s in focus or not. So you can see when my focus is at infinity, clearly, the image is not in focus but if I move back a little bit, the image is quite a bit sharper. To find out much more about Digital Photography and your Digital Camera, go to LBGuides.com.

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