With a not ideal lens to shoot using zone focusing I am making my Street Photography work
I am talking about the Canon 22mm pancake lens. Without an aperture ring and without distance scale. Clearly is not a lens thought for manual focus. But I am doing my work in any case.
I have always disliked easy challenges. It is a fact that I always worked with cameras considered for beginners and never with expensive gear. Even when I owned a Leica: it was the Leica X2, a point & shoot camera.
Now the logic would have it that I used this Canon M200 relying on autofocus but after a couple of months I realized that the photographs were always in focus, but with 3 problems:
the shutter lag
the photos were too perfect
I was not having fun!
With manual focus, of course, I removed the first issue. When it comes to Street Photography technology can do little for those who really know: I am always smile when someone relates super-fast autofocus to street photography. The AF is however always a compromise, a makeshift for a street photographer. The creative part is killed by the use of autofocus why for example work with layers is different if you use the AF of the camera.
On the question of fun, it was soon said: a street photographer about ten years ago said: already with digital very automated at least let me focus manually! And in fact Leica still understands this thing unlike other manufacturers. Guys, let's face it, the final aesthetic of a photo using manual focus is significantly different: more organic, somehow more similar to the result of a film camera. It is certainly true that manual photography is a demanding experience, you have to be more concentrated and in any case you are more exposed to error (but beware that the af also has its problems) and even if with the street you use the technique of zone focusing to the sudden change of a situation if you forget to refocus the blurred photo it is inevitable!
Now working zon zone focusing is certainly easier with a manual lens that counts with aperture and focal distance. The Canon Pancake of Canon has not the aperture ring. I can rely just on focus peak while I focus manually: this makes it more difficult. In the last photographic walk whose results you can see in this video I walked a lot, more than my usual. And in the end I was very tired: in the last part I failed many photos. Despite this, the experience was far more rewarding than if I had used the autofocus. In my photographic research I have never put sharpness first and rather the sensation of vibrant energy of the city, of my mental state, is important, and all this becomes part of the photographic proposal.
These are not perfect photos nor do they claim to be. Those looking for formal perfection in a street photograph often have a problem of offering precisely this feeling of imponderable inherent in the street. Photographs that are too clean remain soulless. The photographic error is part of the game, and it is part of it especially when we talk about street photography.
How many photographers today would propose a photo like this?
It is blurred and out of focus. I believe that today, apart from the community of film photographers, we have grown accustomed to always demanding too perfect a vision of an image. And it seems that even the photographic error cannot be contemplated. Yes, not even among those who claim to accept error as part of the experience. Yes, even street photographers. Yet exactly what we do is in constant connection with failure. Why do so many go out of their way to hide mistakes? I believe that's my role as a street photography blogger to make me affirm the importance of humanizing us street photographers by also showing what someone considers wrong to show. Then you can also think that I am the best worst photographer in the world, is OK with me.
Do I have to explain to you that for me photography is often a fact of reaction to which not the photographic medium but also I cannot do anything about it? This girl turns suddenly and my first instinct was to shoot. Sometimes you can't even have time to fix the focus and you know what? My reaction is to snap anyway.
Then you get such a photograph that rewards all the efforts made. It repays you for the long walks, the mistakes, the frustration of a completely wrong shot that you try to remove from your mind.
When I saw this mother holding her finger under her son's chin, angry, I prayed that she would stay like that, time to get closer and shoot. And it is my favorite street photography, the one that emphasizes human gestures, something that is really happening, without inventing anything special but rather being able to capture such an extraordinarily normal and human scene.
Conclusions
Photography doesn’t need to be perfect. I am not perfect. I am just a guy enjoying the experience to go with a camera on the street. Most of the time I photograph spontaneous scenes. I have no more time available than to recognize the moment and try to photograph it. I use zone focusing because it is a way of allocating more humanity to the experience, because that way I have fun and work better. I am not pretending to say that it works for anyone. This is not and doesn’t want to be a lesson. You know what it workd better for you. Anything that is fun for you is OK in the photography experience. I just wanted to share with you something I strongly believe. I shared with you how much is challenging to work like that with a lens and a camera not really thought for this way to photograph. Am I a good or bad photographer? I don’t know. I just know that this is my photography.
