What Is Zone Focusing?
Zone Focsing. Notice the lens is set to f/8, and the distance scale is positioned with the infinity marker at f/8. This will give you sharp images from approximately 6 feet to infinity.
Zone Focusing for Street Photography
Manufacturers are constantly improving autofocus capabilities. If you have been watching new camera releases lately, you would have heard buzzwords such as phase-detect, eye-detect, and deep-learning AI tracking.
This is all very good and has its place at times for our photography tasks, but these days, I mostly shoot with manual lenses and find it refreshing that I am the one deciding what is going on with regard to focusing instead of the camera.
I have known about zone focusing for quite some time but admit I do not use it enough, probably because I often gravitate toward shooting my lenses wide open or near wide open for a more shallow depth of field.
For street photography, however, zone focusing is an extremely effective tool if you want more depth of field and want to speed things up by completely eliminating focusing.
Granville Street, Vancouver. Leica SL2-S, Voigtländer Nokton 28mm f/1.5 @ f/8
I used zone focusing last week during a street photography outing in downtown Vancouver for a section where I rode by bicycle and, at times, just pointed my camera at the topic or cityscape.
It can also come in handy in inclement weather when perhaps you need to hold an umbrella in one hand, which can make focusing tricky.
Focusing can be a big worry for many photographers, including myself. At times, we spend too much time fuzzing about it, which takes away from the experience of photography and from actually seeing what is in front of us. Zone focusing can give you relief from this. It is essentially a point-and-shoot solution.
Seymour Street, Vancouver. Leica SL2-S, Voigtländer Nokton 28mm f/1.5 @ f/8
How to Do Zone Focusing
Zone focusing works best with wide-angle lenses, as these, by nature, give you more depth of field. In the example here, I used a 28mm lens and f/8, which gives you a decent depth of field.
Set your lens to f/8, then align the “infinity” marker on your lens with f/8. Hopefully, your lens has a distance scale, and you can see your depth of field range.
Please see the feature photo above, where you can see my depth of field range at f/8 from approximately 6 feet to infinity. Bingo. This works great for point-and-shoot scenarios; everything should be sharp in the mentioned range.
For street photography, I shoot in aperture priority mode with auto ISO and a minimum shutter speed of 1/250 to 1/500s. If the light is dim, I may allow for a slower shutter speed.
Zone focusing is fun and liberating, and I suggest you try it the next time you are out with your camera.
Seymour Street, Vancouver. Leica SL2-S, Voigtländer Nokton 28mm f/1.5 @ f/8
Waterfront Station, Vancouver. Leica SL2-S, Voigtländer Nokton 28mm f/1.5 @ f/8
The photos in this post are made using the following photography gear.
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