Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Street Photography
angle lenses have good depth of field. If your subject is 10 feet away and the lens is set for 12 feet, you'd
probably need to enlarge to 20x30" before noticing the error (assuming a typical aperture). This is why
the high-speed film is important. Given a fixed shutter speed, the faster the film the smaller the aperture.
The smaller the aperture, the less critical it is to focus precisely. The extreme case of this is a pinhole
camera, for which there is no need to focus at all.
Street photographers traditionally will set the lens at its hyperfocal distance. This distance depends on
the lens focal length and the aperture but the basic idea is that it is the closest distance setting for which
subjects at infinity are still acceptably sharp. With fast film and a sunny day, you will probably be able
to expose at f/16. With a 35mm lens focussed to, say, 9 feet, subjects between 4.5 feet and infinity will
be acceptably sharp (where "acceptable" means "if the person viewing the final photograph doesn't stick
his eyes right up against it").
A modern alternative is to use a camera with a very high-performance autofocus system and a zoom
lens. The Canon EOS bodies coupled with the instant-focusing ring ultrasonic motor Canon lenses
(about half of the EOS lenses use these motors) are an example of what can work. Paradoxically I find
that I was able to work as quickly and get as high a yield of good images (these are from Guatemala)
with the Mamiya 7 rangefinder camera:
http://www.photo.net/photo/street-photography (3 of 31)7/3/2005 2:18:44 AM