Focus Tab Blues

in which i go to Amsterdam for some street photography

Last Sunday saw me out on the streets of Amsterdam with my trusty Fuji X-Pro3 and the 18mm f1.4. I had also bought one of those focus tabs from Kamera Express, the one that you stick onto the lens barrel in an effort to get my manual focus game on. You see, I discovered this thing called hyper-focal distances, and how they work and how they should take away all the hard work out of manual focussing (and even auto-focus) and give you that ultimate street photography experience. Note: should. I also read it works best on wide angle lenses such as the 18mm, so armed with this knowledge and two spare batteries, I ventured forth.

The trick, apparently, is to set the ISO high, the aperture narrow and the focusing to manual and then using the focus zone meter in the camera to set the area that’s in focus. In my case, I set it all to ISO 800, f8 and a focus range of about 5m to 10m. After that, it’s point and click. Simples.

I spent an afternoon just basically pointing and shooting from the hip, occasionally resorting to the view finder, filling the card with 606 images. And most enjoyable, so it was, the focus tab adding to the Gary Winogrand-vibe and it had me cutting about the place, clicking away (with the electronic shutter, to keep the sound and possible detection to a minimum).

But when I got back and loaded the images into Lightroom, I was surprised at how many of the shots were just not sharp. It may be the lens - the 18mm is not noted for it’s sharpness - it may even be the operator, but whichever it was, results were disappointing. In fact, of the 606 images, only two survived the cull. Two out of 606, a measly 0.33% hit rate.

One of them, is posted above. The other one I’ll keep for a rainy day.

To be honest, I had the wrong settings in the camera. The ISO was too high (so the images grainy), the Sun was too bright so most of the images where about 2 stops overexposed, and worst of all, none of them were in any way interesting. Oh, and throught the viewfinder everything looked pretty close but once I saw the images in Lightroom, well, it’s like I took them from the surface of the moon, that’s how far away everything looked.

18mm is an unforgiving focal length; too far away and there’s too much detail, too much noise, too much distraction. Too close and well, too close.

Lessons have been learned and next time it’ll be better. But I might try the 23mm, or the 35mm next. The 18mm will get another outing, I’m sure, but I’ll have to get another focus tab. The one I had fell off halfway through the day.

Gary Winogrand would have laughed.