In my last post, I discussed how street photography was a genre I had not attempted due to my reluctance to confront people on the street, and how shooting from the hip was a way I found to overcome that inhibition.
I also described briefly how I set up my Fujifilm X100F camera in order to shoot from the hip on the street and how ultimately, the first trip out taking street photographs was a failure. A couple of things I forgot to mention in the last post were that I shot in RAW, and in street shooting, we need to ensure that the camera is ready to fire immediately. Any power-off configuration, e.g. after 5 minutes of inaction, is to be switched off. The camera needs to stay on all the time, so make sure you have plenty of spare batteries.
The following settings I did not change from the first shoot, as they are standard shooting settings for street images
Shutter Speed
1/500 sec to ensure that any movement by subjects is frozen. This can obviously be changed if movement blur is required.
Aperture
F/8.0. For street photography, a good starting point for aperture is generally f/5.6 to f/8. These settings offer a decent balance between depth of field and sharpness.
ISO
I set the ISO to auto using 12800 as the upper limit and 200 (the X100F’s native ISO) as the lowest limit. Using Auto ISO allows me to focus on capturing the moment rather than having to keep my eye on and adjusting exposure settings.
EV Compensation
I moved the EV knob from its usual setting of C to 0. On the X100F, setting the EV (Exposure Value) knob to 0 means the camera’s light meter is set to its default or “normal” exposure value because I will not be attempting any + or – compensation in shooting from the hip.
Zone Focus
Set to 6 feet using the DOF scale in the EV and using Fuji pixel preference setting.
As I have already mentioned all of my Fuji cameras are set up for back button focus (BBF). This decouples the act of focusing from the shutter button to a different button on the camera. This can be the AFL/AEL, AF-On or any other programmable button on the camera. On my X100F, XT-4 and XT-5, I allocate BBF to the button on the front of the camera which I activate with my middle finger.
There is a good article here by well-known photographer Kevin Mullins explaining BBF in some detail.
My cameras are also set to manual focus (M), not S or C. This enables Instant AF (which improves auto-focusing speed) in manual mode and allows the focus ring on the lens to be used together with BBF to fine-adjust focus if necessary. It was this last (usually very advantageous) thing coupled with Zone focusing that caused a problem on my initial shoot, as it seems that I accidentally moved the focus ring on the camera several times without noticing, thus causing the set zone focusing of 6 feet to move, resulting in some out-of-focus shots. The answer to this on the second shoot was to move the focusing switch from M to S (single autofocus), which deactivated the focus ring on the lens, meaning I could not accidentally alter the zone setting. This did help with more scenes being captured in correct focus.
Here are some of the images taken on the second shoot. Click on an image to see a larger version.
A Sensored-View 