old-gregg wrote: gdanmitchell wrote:
If you are striving for ideal focus, AF is generally both faster and more accurate than AF in street photography situations, though it sometimes “gets lost” and you’ll lose a shot here and there. But that’s true with manual focus, too.
How do you shoot, I mean the technique? Center focus point AF + recompose? The thing about "street photography" is that it's not a well defined genre.
Some of it is slow and AF works fine:
But for something like this, I never figured out how to leverage autofocus:
... and those are some of my favorite shots (and generally I prefer motion in an image). That's why I've settled on f/8, prefocus, and "be there" (which is the hard part!)
Generally I'am going to use a small focus zone, but not as small as a (so-called) point. In your second shot I would have made a split second decision as to whether I wanted to choose between the near or far subjects or, if things were happening very quickly, I might have focused on a portion of the car between them, slightly closer to the near figures than the further ones.
Congratulations on that third one — that was an incredibly stroke of luck and timing and quick responses. I also do a lot of birth photography (completely independent of street photography and I quite different locations) and I recognize that getting good focus on a. bird and other soubjects at different distances (even a second bird sometimes) is a real challenge. If I was lucky enough to get that combination of subjects and was quick enough to shoot it, the odds are that I'd try to AF on the bird. But given how quickly that must have happened, in that case refocusing or hyperfocal distance focusing (fortunately at the distance that included the bird!) would give a better result.
But that also highlights an other facts about street. Stuff happens fast sometimes and you are going to miss things. Often I shot what I think is about to happen since waiting to see it occur means I'll be too late — so I end up with a lot of frames where that thing did not end up happening. Also, however you set up your camera, the set won't be right for some things that occur. Fortunately, in the case of the wonderful bird photograph, you got lucky with the distances and timing and, obviously, you were ready to act.
One more thing. There are situations (at leases the way I shoot street) where I get the best results by using AF. But that doesn't mean I cannot choose to MF if I need to. Unfortunately, with that MF only lenses, you don't have the option to go the other way and momentarily switch to AF.
As to what I shoot, it is pretty varied:
etc...
Jan 12, 2026 at 02:03 PM
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