Zone Focusing on the Street & constantly changing light conditions

[rmueller]

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Ok, risking to get punished here, I've rarely seen good photography using zone focusing and shot from the hip. This is a fairy tale youtube influenca's (pun intended) are going to tell. I do use zone focusing though, but this is then with a Medium- or Large format camera on a tripod.

Even street photography benefits from composition. There is such terrible stuff out there where you can see one person, presumably the main subject and five more people coming randomly into the picture from all sides, sharp or not, making sense or not, but mostly distracting and this is then sold as "dynamic". Sorry I don't buy into this or I'm too old for  this.

As far as metering is concerned, this is not rocket science. Get a meter, get out, take a reading when you start, stop down a bit when the scene appears to be lighter than where you took the metering, open up a bit if the scene appears to be darker, be happy for the day. At least for color negative film this works great, different story for slide film.

Main point here, get out and take images.

Have a wonderful Sunday everybody,

Ralf

 

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[erl]

No punishing for your POV. I agree with you. I have been a street photographer, sometimes successful, other times not. I think a large part of the  problem with todays street shooters is the ease with which ones work can be inflicted onto a plethora of viewers, ad nauseum. Serious editing seems to not be serious anymore. Techniques have become sloppy. Digital is largely to blame IMO. The discipline of shooting film is a great editor that seems absent with a lot of digital shooters. It is fine to shoot what impulse triggers one, but selective presentation is imperative, if one is to keep the audience interested.

Another factor is that street is getting tougher to shoot. The subjects of street shooting are getting more twitchy about being photographed, which I think is breeding a generation of hip shooters. All this does not make for better photography.

Probably I have just attracted the punishers, but they must be prepared to show me their work. 

 

[Doug A]

Zone focusing is one thing. Scale focusing is another. Estimating distance can be a learned skill. Same with Sunny 16 for exposure. I tend to shoot ISO 400 film at small apertures. My percentage of "keepers" isn't all that bad. 

[erl]

1 hour ago, Doug A said:

Zone focusing is one thing. Scale focusing is another. Estimating distance can be a learned skill. Same with Sunny 16 for exposure. I tend to shoot ISO 400 film at small apertures. My percentage of "keepers" isn't all that bad. 

Every methodology has its practitioners, for good reason. It works for them. No reason they should change.

I tend to be the opposite of you Doug., in that I prefer wider apertures for a number of reasons. I like selective focus, I frequently work in poor light and  an inbuilt light meter is close to indispensable, with some exceptions. However, when I am using my Leica 111f, I do tend more to your style as described.

[M.RB]

I just expose (ie; meter) for the shadows so I have shadow detail. Develop the film for the contrast/highlights accordingly. Unless my subject is in bright direct sunlight and I don't want shadow detail. But for generic photographs in the CBD, I want detail in the shadows so I just take one meter reading (or guesstimate one) and work from there. The less you're futzing around with changing your exposure settings the easier it is to print later imho.

Obviously all that changes if it's snowy, nighttime, you're after a particular look etc.. no one size fits all.

I'm same as others here in tending to scale focus as I've got a pretty good handle on estimating distance and rarely use wide apertures unless it's a necessity. FWIW I can't recall ever using 1/500th in this sort of setting, unless I want to freeze a vehicle in motion or something, I like fast moving things to have a bit of blur to reflect their movement and using such a fast shutter speed is a real constraint on aperture ymmv.

[Stevejack]

Some good advice in this thread. The film I use with the M3 is pretty forgiving to overexposure so I err on the side of caution - more light on the film is better than less. Where I live I do a lot of sunny 16 metering, and as others have mentioned you take a reading for the brights, a reading for the shade, and keep making adjustments as you walk. 

So with my kids at the park for example, if they move from the sun to being under the shade of a tree, I'll open up a few stops so that I'm ready if something interesting happens. Focus is the same, I'm continually adjusting the scale depending on their distance from me. Exposure and focus is all done well before I raise the camera to my eye. At f/8 and below 50mm you don't need to be spot on with your distance estimates, close enough is fine.

It's only really portraits where the subject mostly fills the frame where I will take more care, but in those situations I'm not trying to capture fleeting moments either. 

I have a Rolleiflex converted to an instax film back which I use a lot and even though instax is completely unforgiving (and about $1.50 / shot!) I'm still just working from 1 highlights reading and 1 shade reading and everything else is estimated as I walk. 

 

 

[250swb]

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Zone focusing isn't focusing, it's just deciding you accept a general level of un-sharpness in which the main subject may, or may not, be the sharpest thing. You are making it a lottery if your image comes out how you wanted it to, and hopefully with the main subject in focus and it's a win, or you have to explain to yourself primarily why it isn't in focus. More than split image screens in an SLR the rangefinder method of focusing is far faster because the accuracy and immediate contrast change doesn't vary between wide angle or tele lenses, so just use that and practice focusing quickly rather than looking for a quick and very lazy fix. I mean, if you can't be bothered how your photographs are focused why should anybody else be bothered to look at them?

[erl]

1 hour ago, 250swb said:

Zone focusing isn't focusing, it's just deciding you accept a general level of un-sharpness in which the main subject may, or may not, be the sharpest thing. You are making it a lottery if your image comes out how you wanted it to, and hopefully with the main subject in focus and it's a win, or you have to explain to yourself primarily why it isn't in focus. More than split image screens in an SLR the rangefinder method of focusing is far faster because the accuracy and immediate contrast change doesn't vary between wide angle or tele lenses, so just use that and practice focusing quickly rather than looking for a quick and very lazy fix. I mean, if you can't be bothered how your photographs are focused why should anybody else be bothered to look at them?

Steve, I sort of agree with you in general, but (there is always a but!) in my particular case, I find I can focus my R8 & 80mm combo faster that my M RF's in many situations. The brightness of the VF of that combo is fantastic and with the mix of split screen, Fresnel Prism and ground glass screen, it is IMO, an unbeatable arrangement. When it comes to 'zone focusing', I am totally with you. 

Of course there is more to photography than just focusing, so when considered all the variations such as compactness, lightness, discreetness  . . . . etc. the the M cameras with RF are generally top of class when all things are considered, as they should be.

[jaapv]

This is the Nth thread where we have to demolish the myth that Zone misfocussing it the way to go about street photography. It is a workaround in case that focussing techniques will not work, nothing more. I used it a lot when I started photographing as my first cameras, a box camera, an Agfa Click and an Agfa Clack, focussed through four symbols: cartoon face, stick man, stick man woman and child and mountains...

[Stevejack]

1 hour ago, 250swb said:

 I mean, if you can't be bothered how your photographs are focused why should anybody else be bothered to look at them?

That's a bit harsh, and I don't think the method of estimating focus is a bad one as long as the rest of the photograph holds up. One of the main reasons I use a rangefinder, especially for moving subjects, is because the subjects are often NOT in perfect focus.

Being able to capture a moving subject in perfect focus is a fairly recent phenomenon (in terms of the ~ 200 year history of photography). A subject in motion doesn't always give the photographer time to nail those things down, only a computer can do that every time and I don't always want my pictures to look like that. I consider estimating focus to be in the same category as using a vintage lens. It gives the photograph a certain look. 

[erl]

Capturing focus on a moving subject with a RF IS difficult, but not impossible. Certainly it is usually easier  with other focus technologies. So, what is important. Always correct accurate focus, or the satisfaction of some times correct focus using your own talent and experience? Usually that will decide which system you use, assuming a choice is possible.

Currently I am scanning my most recent film shot yesterday on a Leica 111f. The lens was  a Canon 85mm Serenar. The film was Delta 400. A more difficult RF system you can not image! Frame #1, the Asian lady with her baby in the stroller. I zone focussed because the time taken to RF focus would have lost the moment of the shot. Frame # 6 on the same film is of a street beggar. I zone focused and shot while walking past without slowing down. I don't know what the rest of the film will look like. Scanning still progressing. Frame # 9 was shot by using the RF. Because of the 'activity' of the subject, I knew I would have time to focus properly. A simple observation on the vintage lens I used. I don't see a 'certain look' because of it, but I am not always very observational. Maybe others can see it.

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[alun]

It's been an awfully long time since I did those things -- zone focusing, manual exposure setting, street photography-- but for seven or eight years it once obsessed me and like the OP I wanted to get as good as I could at the practices that would make it more likely I could take pictures that were at least focused and exposed reasonably well. I found that it just took a lot of practice. But this was my method.

I used two cameras in those days, an M7 and an M6, one with a tabbed 35mm lens, the other with a 50mm (sometimes the little collapsible Elmar). Where I set out I would set both cameras the same. Now, my numbers may be out here because I'm working from memory, but in the UK, using 400ASA film, this would typically mean about f8 at a 125th. With the 35mm I did get *sort of* proficient to some degree with zone focusing but as an earlier poster said, it was more 'guessing focus' that strictly zone focus. For instance, if I knew the lens was focused at say 10-feet I knew roughly where to pull the tab back to to shift it to say 5- or 6-feet. I never could work a 50mm lens that quickly but the collapsible Elmar was pretty close.

As regards exposure readings, I think I eventually began to recognise the existing light conditions and I probably found that my pictures were more consistent by just opening or closing a stop, more or less by instinct, than if I constantly checked and changed. But I also found a method -- not original. I'm sure -- that worked well for me, especially in summer when the light can change from scene to street or street to street by several stops. If I was walking into sunlight I would quickly take a reflective reading from behind me with a light meter and see how close it was to the setting I was already using. If the sun was behind me or say to one side then I would just raise the camera and dab the shutter to activate the meeter, using the asphalt road surface as an approximate grey card reading. I learnt to avoid reflected light from pale pavements, puddles, glossy surfaces etc and I also knew that this method was probably giving me a generous exposure that would be a stop or so over. My only real concern was to avoid massive under-exposure.

After a while I found that I could do these checks and changes without thinking too much about them -- this left me free to concentrate more on seeing and/or anticipating photos and being more prepared for shifting focus. 

Only on a couple of occasions can I remember using auto-exposure. I remember for example being in a street demo of some kind. I knew what the light was like that I was walking into but suddenly something off to one side in deep shadow against a building doorway caught my eye. I flicked the M7 over to auto and let it choose the exposure. That got me a picture that I think I would otherwise have missed because I wasn't confident at guessing likely exposures at that time. The picture was rubbish, as it happens, but it was perfectly exposed!

Sorry to ramble on but the OP's question reawakened muscle-memories that I thought were long dead...

I remember scouring photography books for those where photographers talked about their methods and I used to have quite a collection. Very few mentioned the complexities of metering/focusing, however, but one little book I remember learning an immense amount from was the Joel Meyerowitz collection in the Phaidon 55 series, where he talks about each image. After a while I began to see *how* the picture had been taken. That he is writing about a time when he was largely teaching himself about street photography, the little snippets were often extremely informative. 

[Eli4-2]

I think you just need to practice. If i'm between lighting situations, like you said, my gut is to drop my shutter two stops and maybe my aperture one stop. If it's really shady, then I'm stopping everything down a little more, always leaning toward what I may think is slightly overexposed.

[davidmknoble]

Exposure seems to be the topic from the OP. If you accept EV15 in the sun and EV12 in the shade then for f/8 at 800 speed film that would be 1/800 for f/16 or 1/3200 for f/8 in the sun and 1/400 in the shade (3 stops). Ilford 125 gives you 1/500 at f/8 in the sun or shooting Tri-X at iso 200 gives you 1/1000 at f/8.  Cloudy days obviously start less. It’s picking film and f/stop for the days weather. If you don’t want to constantly meter.  

[raizans]

Scale focusing by feel is part of what makes focusing tabs so great. 1) Hold your camera the right way to have a consistent frame of reference, 2) become familiar with standing the right distance away from your subject for various common framings (focus by framing), and you’ll be able to reliably pull the focusing tab the right amount without even bringing the camera to your eye.

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