I have on more than one occasion ragged on my friend and occasional shooting buddy Ron Wise to "pour yourself a seasonally appropriate beverage, ensconce your pooper in a comfy easy chair, and READ YOUR DAMN MANUAL!!" We'll be out shooting something and he'll be fiddling with menus trying to do this or that and I show him the easy way to get there. This sometimes results in a V8-style forehead slap on Ron's part.
Well, this morning, I followed my own advice and dusted off the manual for my Canon EOS-5D for a refresher on, among other things, a few custom functions whose exact purpose had faded from memory. I discovered (rediscovered?) a nifty thing in the 5D's custom function menu. Custom function 13 allows you to specify how you manually select AF focusing points. Being a fairly dedicated manual focuser, I don't do a lot of that, but it does come in handy from time to time. Maybe I'm shooting an extended session where the subject will always be in the right hand side of the frame. Just choose a focus point in the right hand side and leave it there. Simple.
But the default selection method is just a little bit of a pain. Press the AF point select button and rotate the command dial until the point you want lights up in the viewfinder or on the top LCD. Easy enough, I suppose, but it does require re-allocating cerebral resources I'd rather devote to composition, focus, and timing. Using custom function 13, option 1, I can now use the multi-controller (the little joystick thingy just above the command dial) to choose my AF point. Just push it in the direction of the point you want to use and it's selected. No more multiple clicks of the command dial to get from a side point back to the center.
This is pretty sweet and I can't believe I used the 5D more than two years without knowing this. For users of the 40D (which is actually the camera on which I'd be more likely to do this), the equivalent custom function is in Set III (Auto Focus/Drive), function number 3, option 1.
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