This lens is too rare for me to lose.
Come on, it's gotta be somewhere.
Just saw the big group of dogs together.
Do you want to get a quick photo?
Is that alright? If you want to just step
back into the sun here.
Are these all your dogs or
are you just out dog walking?
Oh nice.
It's a nice day for it at
least compared to normal.
That's lovely. Thanks very much.
Take care. Have a good one.
Cameras today are so fast, accurate and
reliable that it's
actually hard to miss a photo.
No, not you, Lumix.
But cameras are designed
for controlled environments.
Like shooting press,
shooting weddings, shooting sports.
You might think that none of those things
are controlled environments.
Well, one important factor is controlled.
And that is you, the
photographer's position.
In most of these situations, the
photographer is stationary.
You remain in one spot or you're moving
slowly in relation to your subjects.
And this is perfect for autofocus.
This means you can utilize changing your
AF point, setting the tracking and always
nail focus regardless of your aperture.
However, in street photography, we need
something much faster than this.
In contrast to these other examples, in
street photography, it's not only that
our subjects are moving all
around us in a 360 direction,
but also we're moving in between all
those people at the same time.
Have you ever tried using autofocus in a
crowded street and actually trying to
nail like a candid shot perfectly?
You've probably experienced the problem
that I have when you
point your camera at someone
and you're waiting for the autofocus
point to either catch them
from like a wide selection area
or a single spot to actually confirm
focus before you
actually press the shutter.
If you're too busy half pressing and then
pressing the full shutter,
you lose quite a lot of time and the
moment's already passed.
This is the problem I've been having when
shooting digital for
the last couple of years.
And it's part of the reason that my a6700
has actually become more
of my at home filming camera
and my a7s, which is the video focus
camera, has become my run
and gun street photo camera.
If I can't find it, I'm have to go back
to using this horrible 7R sand lens.
No, I refuse.
So if autofocus isn't useful in street
photography, then what's the alternative?
Well, I want to talk to
you about zone focusing.
You may have heard of
zone focusing before.
You may have even tried it before.
But let's have a quick
refresher on the subject.
And therefore, E equals MC squared.
Oh, Miss Mullins, come in.
So there are three things
that we need to understand here.
The first is what
lens should we be using?
The second is what the fudge is a zone?
And the third is how to
set up and use zone focus.
Starting with the lens we use.
Rather than using an autofocus lens,
instead, we're going to
use a manual focus lens.
But not just any manual focus lens.
We require a manual lens with a full
frame equivalent focal length of around
35 millimeters or wider.
So 35, 28, 24 would be good.
This can be done with
something like a 50mm lens.
And I have done it when shooting in
extremely bright scenarios where I could
have my f-stop all the way down at 16.
But it's much easier to frame shots
accurately and quickly with
a wider focal length lens.
For example, here we have a manual focus
28 millimeter lens that you can buy super
cheap for around 40 pounds.
I would guess 60 US dollars.
And with a super cheap and cheerful
manual lens adapter, we can adapt this to
any mirrorless camera we need.
And we're ready to go.
Before I get carried away, number two,
what the fudge is a zone?
The important thing we need to look at
here are these little
markings on the top of the lens.
We have a stack of information we need to
pay attention to here.
The aperture ring at the very bottom, our
zones of focus in the center, and our
focus distance, which you'll
be familiar with at the top.
You'll notice these zones of focus here.
And these correspond with our
f-stops on the aperture ring.
So you can see that the f numbers start
at the shallow depth of field
right in the center with f4,
and they move out to f8, f11, f16, f22.
This means that if I have my aperture set
to f11, for example,
I can focus from the closest point of
about 1.5 meters all the way up to
infinity far in the distance.
There you are.
But it's not there.
It's meant to be on this camera.
At this rate, I'm going to have to use
the end of Starlines.
Nobody wants to use the end of Starlines.
The amazing thing about zone focusing is
that once you know how to do it, you can
do this on any camera
you ever want to use.
You no longer have to weigh up the
autofocus abilities of one
camera brand versus another.
Instead, you can just commit to using
this one method of focusing and always be
confident in your shots.
And of course, this is also super useful
if you want to be
shooting film at any point,
because this is primarily the way that
street photographers would
focus when shooting on film.
On film, however, we run the risk of
getting poor exposure or motion blur in
our images when trying to compensate for
lower ISO film stocks.
When we set our aperture to say f8 or f11
or higher, we start
letting in a lot less light.
And if we're using an ISO, say 100 or 200
film, we're going to need to be shooting
on quite a bright day
to get usable images.
You can then try and make up for this
exposure by lowering your shutter speed.
But then if you're moving quickly and
your subjects are moving quickly, you're
going to introduce motion blur.
However, when we're using these lenses on
digital cameras, this
is much less of an issue.
I guess I'm going to have to use this
Minolta lens instead.
That is disturbing.
Almost as disturbing as knowing that only
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this channel are subscribed.
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Now to use this abomination.
The lens I have here is my
Canon 35mm L39 lens made in 1957.
It uses the Leica 39mm or L39 mount for
rangefinder bodies from
Leica, Zorki, Canon, etc.
Which means that when it's adapted to a
mirrorless camera, it manages to fit very
snug against the body compared to doing
the same thing with an SLR adapted lens.
You can achieve a setup like this with
any digital camera and any vintage lens.
A super affordable way to get started
with this would be getting like an old
28mm or 35mm SLR lens and adapting it to
an original Canon 5D or a
5D Mark II or a Nikon D700.
That would be epic.
A couple of newer lens manufacturers
actually started by making
manual focus lenses first.
Two that I've personally used are
7Artisan and TT Artisan who actually make
some quite promising lenses for zone
focusing even on crop sensor cameras.
For crop sensor lens mounts, TT Artisan
actually have a great lens that I tried
myself and it is the 23mm f1.4.
And I believe this is available for Sony
E-mount as well as the Fuji X mount which
is the version that I tried.
I used this on the Fuji X Pro 1 and it
gave me a 35mm full frame equivalent
field of view and it actually had
reliable zone focusing marks on the top.
I think I know how I can make this work.
Hello lens, meet Mr Hammer.
Okay, just dodge the glass.
What changes does using these lenses
actually make to your photography?
Well, I want to show you a few
comparisons between the mistakes I've
been using when shooting autofocus versus
the progress I've been making when
shooting zone focus
with old manual lenses.
Even when I'd shoot at a 28mm or
equivalent field of view 35mm or 50mm, I
often found myself really painstakingly
trying to frame my shot and nail focus on
the perfect subject.
And by the time I got around to lining
all these things up,
the moment had passed.
The times I would try and do a quick turn
and take a shot with autofocus, I would
often find that I either completely miss
focus whatsoever or I'd mess up the
framing or I would end up like going for
kind of a lazy tracking shot of someone
doing something pretty uninteresting.
On the flip side, when I've been shooting
using zone focus, I feel like the
position and direction of the subject
doesn't matter anymore.
Whether I'm zone focusing with my
Minolta, with my old Canon 7 or with the
Sony A7S, it all works the same.
All I have to do is just know what my
distance is, my closest distance on my
zone focus, point my camera and shoot.
I don't have to look for the autofocus, I
don't have to worry about any of that.
As long as I'm not super underexposed or
super overexposed, just
point and shoot. Keep it simple.
I've done it. The perfect union, Sony and
Canon, perfectly
crafted from a Minolta lens.
Almost as perfect as this fake Ricoh
GR3X, which I made for $300 that you can
watch in this video
here. It's perfection.