@Bonehead, while taking pics this weekend I remembered something else about the focusing aspect that might be helpful if you didn't know about it already. A lot of the newer cameras have the default settings (especially in auto modes) to look for faces to focus on, or at least to hunt for multiple focus points at once. I really hated that feature and switched it back to just use a single focus point in the center. It was much easier to just focus on what I wanted and then I could always slightly adjust my position or crop later for different compositions. The only time I use one of the multi-point focusing modes is when I'm trying to get a bird in flight up in the sky.
Many cameras also let you change the size of the focus box to make it smaller. That is useful when you are trying to take a picture of something small that has other things near it in the foreground that would normally be caught be a larger focusing box and make it near impossible to lock focus on the smaller farther away thing. My camera has a manual focus setting, but it is so fiddly to do with buttons that I almost never use it. I really miss the ability to focus with a ring around the lens like my old film slr. That's the trade off for getting an affordable super zoom camera though I guess.
