Zone Focusing Simplified

#photography #howto #filmphotography

Ever wondered what all those numbers are on lenses are for? The combination of the distance scale and depth of field scale allows you to zone focus - basically making depth of field work to your advantage. In some types of photography - like street photography for instance - it's a lot easier and faster to use zone focusing instead of trying to pinpoint focus on a single subject. It's pretty easy, and I'll show you how to do it.

This video, however, isn’t intended to be the end-all, be-all of using zone focusing. There are ultimately other things that play into this concept. Things like print size and viewing distance of said prints. And there’s this thing called the Circle of Confusion - and while that may sound like a rock band from the 1960s - it’s a bit of a deep dive into the physics of lenses and film. And even though I consider myself technically-minded, I’m not an expert OR know enough about it to convey anything useful in that regard.

On the other hand, I do believe that you can take this information and immediately put it to use in your photography. Can it be more complicated than I’ve expressed? Absolutely. Is it always more complicated than I’ve expressed? Nope. And if you understand the basics as covered here, it will give you an excellent starting point for your further investigation of the topic.


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