What I do mostly is landscape and macro photography. A lot of the features (focus tracking for example) are engineered for action and sports photography. Either that or they are optimized for taking photos of people in constant motion (which sort of boils down to the same thing).
Just recently I was trying to take a photo of a stationary object in the midst of many other objects. Think of a single flower in the midst of other flowers, leaves, and stems. If you tell the camera to be "smart" it tends to think the closest object is the most important and what you want.
What I want it is a single focus point in the center of the camera. It sort of seems sad with 425 focus points, but for now it will serve my purposes better than getting all of them into the game. We can figure out how to quickly change from "simple center focus" to other smart modes and back again at some later date.
The idea is that we configure a button on the back of the camera to command focus rather than having it on the half press of the shutter button. There are about 249,000 articles online about this and why it is good, so I won't repeat them here. But notice that this allows you to focus on what you want, then recompose later -- which is the essence of it all.
First, take it off the shutter button. Menu -- Camera 1 -- page 6, then find AF with shutter and change on to off.
Next, put it on a button on the back. Menu -- Camera 2 -- page 8, then find "Custom Key", select "1" to use the button in the middle of the AF/MF - AEL switch. Go right to the AF3 page, and select AF-ON.
Be sure the switch is up (to AF/MF) and you are in business.
While you are there, look at the next "box" to the right (top row, third from the left). Selecting "center" seems to do what I want although it is not a single spot.
Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org