Wednesday, April 17, 2013

The fine relationship between Zone Focus and your passed out friends...

When I got into street photography, I was always reliant on automatic focussing or manual focussing and I was constantly frustrated as I could not capture those fleeting moments that classic photographers were able to capture. I thought there must be something wrong with my eye/finger coordination or neuro connections. My subjects had to be pretty static or very slow and I was generally not that satisfied with my results. Then I heard about Zone Focus. It transformed my street photography. This magical method seemed to do the trick, but I still had trouble in getting the results because I usually misinterpreted the distances. So, I devised this method which I recently divulged in a post on a social networking site to a friend who expressed difficulty using the method, which spurred this post.  It was posted as follows:

" Think of a good friend that you have in mind very well, their height. You must know how tall they are. Now imagine that day when for some reason they have gone nuts or knocked out drunk and lied on the floor. You stood there at their feet looking at their face. Now, on the street with your camera, re-imagine that moment. My friend was 1.5m which is 5 feet. That's my close working distance with a 35 to 50mm lens. 2 or 3x my friend on the floor is 4.5m or 15 feet. It fits loads in with a 35mm lens. I set my camera, closing the aperture to at least f8 (of course after loading a film of 400 or above to give me fast shutter speeds) and at f8 I should have a free focus area between "my friends unconscious face" and another 2 or 3 times my friend's unconscious body distance with a relatively wider lens. With a really wide lens that can be from 1m to infinity. So everything is in focus regardless. |That's how I started and it has worked for me ever since.So, knocked out friends can be of use see? :D"


So, I thought I would share with you and I hope it got you in good spirits and humour as it did me, still laughing recalling how I developed my way of doing it and hope it can be of help to you, dear readers! :)

Keep an eye out for the up coming Fujica Auto-M and Fujica 35EE review to be posted soon.


 Until next time, Luis

Friday, April 05, 2013

This blog is now back and live!

Hello again dear friends and readers,

I know it's been a a good while since I have updated this blog (3 years in fact, time runs fast!), but I have not been still. I have another two blogs mainly dedicated to posting some photographic work, since writing was taking a big chunk of my time. I have also started teaching. Don't get me wrong, I love writing, particularly about photography and cameras, but nowadays more than ever time is short, time is money and without any sort of capitalisation, it is hard to keep it up. But I miss it. It not only helps me analyse, review and digest what's happening in photography right at this moment, how it affects me and my art as well as how it may affect you and your art. It also seems to help other fellow photographers and buddying photographers. Even though I have not updated these pages for nearly 3 years, I have received some very positive feedback and messages from fellow photographers regarding this blog and at over 20000 views (with almost 100 views so far for today!),  I have decided to bring this blog back for my reviews and add a voluntary contribution button, details of which I will soon post. It helps me and it helps you get the content as well as information that you may be looking for.

There is a bit of work to be done on the previous image links for the older posts, as they were connected to a flickr account that had to be taken down, but with time the images will come back, particularly for the reviews.

PS:  Keep an eye out for my next review on two very interesting classic rangefinders. For the other two blogs, I will update the sidebar on this blog with the links. 

- Twin Lust - 
Luis Rubim 2010

Hope to see you soon,

Luis