Zone Focusing On My Laowa

Zone Focusing: I continue to improve my "A-Game" for using manually focused lens. Channeling my best Cartier-Bresson, I am trying to capture that Decisive Moment, and coincidentally, trying to reduce the time required to focus my ersatz Leica, a.k.a. my Fuji X-E1. Fuji's own lenses lack distance and depth-of-field scales, and while the autofocus function works well, the camera must be pointing at your subject long enough for the camera to lock on target. To be true to the moment, the camera-subject distance should be set before the camera floats towards the photographer eye, capturing the photo in a single fluid motion. Or so in my dreams.

Original image can be seen here.

I was introduced to an interesting, Leica-screw mount lens, the Voigtländer Snapshot Skopar, by my friend Shawn. This 25mm F 4.0 lens featured a click stop on the focusing ring at 1, 1.5, 3 meters. The handy "stick shift" (arrow) allows the shooter to set one of these three distances by feel alone. This would allow one to set the distance without looking at the camera, well before the arrival of that Decisive Moment. The lens's small maximum aperture provides a rather generous depth of field when wide open, and much more when stopped down a bit.

When I first saw it, I was enchanted. I could easily obtain an adapter so that it would work on any of my X bodies. The only thing that stopped me was the focal length. At 25mm, it effectively becomes a 38mm lens, a useful length, but long enough to warrant more precise framing when in actual use. Unfortunately, I do already own a 17mm lens, a TT Artisans  F 1.4, which would provide a similar outlook as the 25mm on a full-framed body, but it has neither to compact size, nor the cachet, of so novel a lens as the Snapshot. It goes without saying that the Skopar did have both a distance scale and a depth of field scale, as would any lens without rangefinder coupling. Alas, a more modern iteration of this novel lens concept shall have to do. For the moment, the best contender is the Laowa 10mm.

Vanishing Distance Scale: In my last post, I installed a Cat Labs Rubber Focusing Tab on my 10mm F 4.0 Laowa lens. It has improved my ability to focus in the cramped control environment of this pancake lens, and  decreased the occurrences of finger photobombing. Unfortunately, the Focusing Tab completely covered the distance scale. To  make matters worse, the infinity stop doesn't wasn't properly set, which is to say that it is capable of focusing the lens past infinity. When focusing through the electronic view finder (EVF), I made it a practice to rotating the focusing until it stopped, and backpedaled a bit to bring the lens back to the right side of infinity. It's easy enough to remember, right up to the moment when you forget.

Zone Focusing is a technique that takes advantage of the depth of field provided by short focal length lenses. If you look at the left photo (above), you  can see a Depth of Field Scale engraved on the non-rotating portion of the lens. In this photo, the  [∞] (left photo, down arrow) is aligned with the [8] (left photo, up arrow), which means that any subject at "infinity" will be in focus. To determine the nearest subject that will still be in focus, I simply locate the [8] located to the left of the scale, which marks the closest subject that will be in focus. While difficult to see, the nearest subject distance at this setting would be 0.3 meters. Finally, if I look at the Focusing Index, you can see that it is aligned with a subject distance of 0.5 meter. Using a gold Sharpie marker, I made a smudge just above the 0.5 setting on the knurled portion of the focusing ring. I finally replaced the rubber Cat Labs Focus Tab.

In use, I would set the lens to F 8.0 and align the gold dot with the Focusing Index (right photo, down arrow), and know that everything from 0.3 meters to infinity will be in reasonable focus. This zone focusing technique is reserved for those times when there isn't time to properly focus, or if one just wants to capture images "in the moment".