manual/pre focus with native lenses?

[gauss]

hi guys, could you help a lurker out,

how easy is it to sort of pre-focus today's m43 cameras for street shooting? And I mean the "focus at 6 feet and shoot all day" type of pre-focusing.

I've been shooting digital lately and my old P&S has the neat feature of letting me fix the focus at a selected distance (from a menu).

Looking for better image quality, I tried pre-focused shooting with my DSLR and kit lens, but found that simply swinging the camera around threw off the focus!

With legacy lenses and their distance scales I suppose it's a no-brainer. But what about the modern, native lenses?

Is it just a matter of auto-focusing first at my preferred distance and then turning off the AF? Do these modern lenses have "loose" focus rings like my dslr's kit lens, and therefore I can't trust their focus to stay put?

(looking to buy a small digital but with good IQ, to use for everyday shooting, and m43 is looking good)

 

[greyelm]

On my Lumix GF1 there is a focus lock button that can be enabled in the menu. With this you can focus on a subject at your preferred distance and then lock with the button. Unlike the Fuji X100 there is no depth of field displayed so you would need a suitable table or iPhone app to work out the hyperfocal distance.

 

[Godfrey]

I worked with a Panasonic G1 for two years.

To do zone focus, I found an adapted manual lens is preferable to any of the dedicated lenses. This is because when the camera powers down, the focus point is lost so you have to reacquire it through every power cycle.

That said, the AF on these cameras works very well and does a good job with street photography, particularly if you enable the face detection mode too. I came to trust it and use it this way ... it returned amazingly good results.

I do prefer manual focus, however, and moved over to the Ricoh GXR with A12 Camera Mount unit instead of the Micro-FourThirds bodies. I prefer the Ricoh controls and ergonomics and it lets me leverage my M-bayonet lenses on an alternative body.

 

[JoeV]

I've been using a Vivitar Series 5, 24mm f/2.8 lens, in Minolta MD mount, as the primary lens on my G1 for a few weeks now, and love it, especially presetting focus via the lens' DOF ring. I also like knowing where the aperture is set (again, by visually checking the lens) without having to chimp the LCD. It's equivalent FOV to 48mm is about ideal for street, since you don't have to get quite so close to your subjects as you would with a wider lens.

I found this lens, new in box, at my local camera store, had been on the shelf and never sold for over a decade. A steal of a price.

Here's an example image, imported to iPad2 and processed in Cameramatic app.

 

[ktran]

Native micro four thirds lenses are focus-by-wire, and so swinging the camera won't affect the focusing. In this case, the old "f/8 and be there" adage works quite well. For a moderate focal length, just set to f/8, and focus about 12 feet in front of you, then throw the camera into manual focus (thereby locking your focus). Then go out and have fun. Just remember that zone focusing won't get you the pin-sharp results necessary for modern-day pixel-peeping!