In the Zone

For those day trips or weekend getaways, you might struggle to pick the right gear to take. In my experience, the less you bring, the better, since we often tend to overpack. I recommend bringing a prime lens between 28mm and 50mm, but the choice is yours. In a recent trip up to a lakefront town, I opted for a Konica 40mm because of its compact design. When paired with a lens adapter, it was no bigger than a native prime lens. Limiting yourself to one lens is more beneficial than you think. The lack of options changes how you go about composing your photo or if something is worth adding to your shutter count. To make your experience easier, here is a tip that’s old as photography itself, zone focusing.

Zone focusing is a term used to describe a manual focusing technique that revolves around aperture and focus distance. Vintage lenses have a depth of field (also referred to as DOF) scale between the focus scale and aperture dial. The DOF scale lets you know what will be in focus based on your aperture value in relation to focus distance. In the demonstration below, I set my lens to f/8 and focused the lens to 10ft. According to the dof scale, when my lens is at f/8, anything from around 8ft to about 15ft will be in focus. If I stop down to f/11, anything from about 6ft to 30ft will be in focus.

This technique turns your camera into a point and shoot setup which is perfect for a day trip out in a bustling setting such as a farmer’s market, or any other event. It allows you to capture moments as they happen with little to no adjustments. This technique is popular with contemporary street photography but can be used for scenarios where you just want to snap away. Below are some sample images from the Konica 40mm at f/11 on a Fujifilm X-Pro3: