Focus on What’s Important

"Keep your eye on the ball!" In other words, stay focused on what's important. That's easy in a ballgame, but what about in your movie? You can't just scream at the viewers, "Watch where she lays down that book!" Or can you? If you use focus effectively, you can lead the viewers' eyes exactly where you want them to look. In other scenes, you may want them to take in the whole screen. You can choose that as well.

Or, you could just let the camera decide and leave it in auto focus. You could also set you car to cruise control and take a nap. Both of these techniques lead to less than optimum results, and believe it or not there have been reports of people doing each of these.

However, the systematic, precise control of focus is one of the distinguishing characteristics of modern filmmaking and good cinematography.