SHUTTER RELEASE:
The button is located in a good place and has a soft touch. You need to depress it slightly to make the camera focus, then you are ready to depress it all the way to make the image on film. If you try to take a picture before focusing it acts like a very quick self timer, and dissipates any concept of 'decisive moment.'
AUTOFOCUS:
There is a marker in the center of the frame which you place over the textured object on which to focus. When you depress the shutter button slightly, focus is achieved and a confirmatory, pleasant, sound is emitted. It is very straight forward, but if you are in a hurry, you need to turn the autofocus off. This is easily done with a lever on the camera body. Then you can twist the front of the lens and focus in the usual manner (though it is less than a quarter of a turn to go from macro to infinity).
The camera back has a lever to tell it which autofocus sensor to use. The choices are to use the center area, or a peripheral area or a camera-defined area.
The center area works best for me. If you have strabismus or some other ailment, maybe you want to define a focus area on the right or left of center for some reason. If you use the 'camera-defined' focus area, the camera chooses one of the 5 focus areas on its own. This essentially makes it impossible to focus. The camera shows the sensing area to you by outlining it in black, but as soon as you move it over your subject to focus, it switches to a different area. This thoroughly confounds ones ability to have the subject in focus, so I avoid that one (it is marked in green as a warning).
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