Street Photography

Photography by Volker Hett (photo.net)
The classic technique for street photography consists of fitting a wide (20mm) or moderately wide-angle (35mm) lens to a camera, loading high-speed film (ISO 400), and pre-focusing the lens. Pre-focusing? How do you know how far away your subject will be. It turns out that it doesn't really matter. Wide 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. Article by Philip Greenspun, more