If you’ve been following my work lately you have probably seen that I’ve recently invested quite a bit into a new camera system. This is Nauticam’s RED Raptor system, and while I probably should have used the money on a down payment for a house, I’d like to share why I decided to invest the money into a RED instead, and maybe, maybe, why you should as well… but probably not. That’s bad advice.

I hear this all the time from filmmakers starting out, with Mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7SIII and FX3 why would we ever need to bother learning manual focus?

And to that, I ask you have you ever finished shooting a project and jumped into the edit, only to notice that some of your favourite shots are ruined by a distracted or jumpy autofocus system or that in an essential moment of footage your autofocus was locked onto the wrong target. And given no other option, you’re either forced to use to the out of focus footage or delete the whole scene?

It's moments like this that originally drove me to learning manual focus many years ago, for situational moments where I knew my autofocus system wasn’t going to perform well, and today, this among a large range of other reasons is why I shoot almost all of my footage using manual focus.