Noob in need of help

[conropl]

If you are seeing more than one red square light up, or a square that is not in the center; then you have it set in mode that lets the camera choose the focus point. The problem with that is it may chose to focus on something that you do not care about and your subject will be out of focus. In the case of a bird in a tree, there are many options for tagets (branches) at different depths and the camera may pick one in front of or behind your subject which will leave what you want to see fussy. I suspect this is what is going on.

So it sounds like you have the camera set to auto select focus points. If you want to focus on a specific subject in the frame, then set it to "Spot AF" and manually select a point that lines up with the subject. However, for simplicities sake, if you want the most accurate focus, then stick with the point in the center or one adjacent to it.

Otherwise, set to "Spot AF" and keep the center point selected. Then put the center point over the subject and push the shutter button half way down to focus; then holding the button to maintain the focus, recompose (reframe), and take the picture. This is probably a good place to start until you get more used to the controls to move points around.

I guess my main point here is to take control to force the camera to focus where you want and do not leave it up to the camera to randomly determine where/what it is going to focus on (it seems random sometimes anyway). The camera is capable of so many neat things, but you can not turn over total control or you get what you get.

I hope that helps.