When you were shooting in automatic mode on your camera, the camera would automatically find the subject and focus for you. Now that you’re shooting manually, it’s time to take control of your focus as well.
Your camera ALWAYS focuses on one specific spot in the scene. It is physically impossible for a lens to focus on two spots at once. When you look through your viewfinder, you see a bunch of dots (Canon) or small boxes (Nikon). Those markings show you where in the frame the camera is focusing. This spot generally blinks red when the camera sets focus.
In the picture below, I chose to focus on the ant on the flower, since that is where I wanted people to look. To do this, I set the camera to spot focus and used the four-way selector on the back of my DSLR to move the focus point onto the ant.
Sometimes, the spot in the picture where you want to focus will not have a focus point available. This is especially true on entry-level Canon Rebel or Nikon D3200 DSLRs, which do not have many focus points. If you find that this is the case, check out this article on focusing and recomposing.
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