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Manual Focus For Fun and Profit

In Photography on 26 February 2009 with 2 comments

Sometimes I prefer to focus manually. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no Luddite. I love autofocus and only partly because I’m a very lazy photographer. Or rather lazy in general. I’d probably go crazy if I had to manually focus my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 at wide apertures when snapping concert shots. Add badly lit stages and the dinky, dim viewfinder on my D40 and I’d be in hell.

But focusing manually need not mean squinting into an all too tiny viewfinder of a crop sensor DSLR and twisting the focus ring until that green light stays on. I’ve used my aforementioned Sigma 30, a modern lens that has autofocus, a lot in manual focus mode for street photography. But instead of focusing while looking through the viewfinder I prefocus.

This technique is a lot more enjoyable with my old Zorki-4 rangefinder camera, though. Its 1961 vintage Jupiter-8 50/2 lens not only has a proper distance scale but depth of field markings as well. Quick zone focusing¹ is child’s play when a glance down at your lens tells you where your depth of field lies. I usually prefocus to the hyperfocal distance when feasible, though.

I recently bought an old Nikkor-N 24mm f/2.8 lens as I fancied something wider than 30mm for street photography. Although not in league with the Jupiter-8 the Nikon 24mm has a better distance scale than the Sigma. It also has a rather basic depth of field scale but its use is somewhat limited as it’s marked for 35mm film cameras. Never mind that; I keep a set of laminated depth of field tables, for 18, 24 and 30mm, in my camera bag (see, I’m a nerd) so I can check what I’m doing. It’s also a good way of slowly memorising the various distances that matter for the apertures I use the most.

But the beauty of a wide angle lens such as the 24mm is that depth of field is comparatively huge. Even at f/5.6 you’ll hit hyperfocal a bit past 5m and everything from about 2.5m will be in focus. Using manual focus in this way makes street photography faster than with autofocus but also means that when I look in the viewfinder I have nothing to think about besides composition and framing.

So this is one reason I love manual focus but there are more. A nice bonus when using old manual focus lenses on my D40 is that I must control the aperture with the aperture ring on the lens. On any Nikon DSLR that has two control wheels, thus all but the D40, D40x and D60, this isn’t as big a thing but getting a dedicated aperture control on the D40 makes operation of the camera a lot more pleasant.

On the flip side the D40 won’t meter with my 24mm, nor most other Nikon manual focus lenses, and the camera will only work with it in manual mode. But that’s how I want to use it most of the time anyway and, besides, what do you expect for €47.50 including shipping? The 24/2.8 may not be the best lens I have but it’s also not the cheapest. That honour goes to my Nikon Series-E 75-150mm f/3.5, made in the early eighties, which I got for free from a total stranger.

The honour of which lens is my best probably also belongs to the E75-150 so old and cheap need not mean crappy image quality. Even if I hadn’t been lucky E75-150s are dirt cheap and especially so considering their optical quality. I’m a lot less fond of manual focusing when it comes to telephotos, though, as it is generally harder than with wide angles. But in my case I had only a limited need for a telephoto and a limited budget. The focus system of the D40 is also quite limited so for the purpose I originally got the lens, football photography, I’m not sure how much better off I would have been with an autofocus lens. Especially a cheap one which would potentially have had slow autofocus, small variable aperture and less image quality.

So old manual focus lenses can be a great option for those who have little to spend on gear but can devote some time to practice their manual focus skill. Not that all manual focus lenses are old and cheap as new ones are still being made for cameras that can use autofocus lenses. There may not be many today that choose to focus manually with their 21st century wündercameras but for some things it may just work better than autofocus.

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