Recently I've gotten into street photography, and I've noticed there are some situations where it is technically impossible to autofocus, to be precise, when you have moving objects and don't want to focus on the object that is closest to the camera. Picking a specific AF sensor would, obviously, be way too slow in this situation.
What I'm wondering is: Is it possible to train focussing manually so well that you can be sufficiently fast in these situation that you can focus correctly in these situations even with a wide aperture? Obviously, this would require a big viewfinder, a lot of manual-focussing training and a lot of composition training (you have to know what to focus on in order to actually focus). Can anybody of you do this? ;-)
Answer
Absolutely! And especially in street photography or low-light situations, you don't even need to be quick.
Say, you are shooting people walking along the sidewalk while you are sitting at a cafe across the street, you can pre-focus once and just snap away as interesting people walk by. Autofocus would try to refocus every time you took a shot, and that lag causes lost shots.
If you understand your aperture and shutter speeds well enough, you can also employ something called "hyperfocus" that allows you to control the depth of field and set a range of distances in which everything will be in focus.
And as for your Leica buddy, the photographer views the scene in a rangefinder through a different lens. So there is a tradeoff: while they might be able to focus more critically on distant objects (which are also more likely to be in focus anyway due to depth of field), they have more difficulty focusing on and composing close objects due to parallax (the viewfinder and lens see the scene from a different angles).
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