Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/08/31
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> << Try walking around your > house or neighborhood with no film in the camera pretending you are a FBI > agent and imagine scenes poping into view then, quick focus and shoot. I > have done this for many hours and still occasionally do it<<<<<<<<<<< Howdy Gang, There is one fast way to learn how to focus quickly and it never fails, unless you're not physically coordinated with your hands and fingers. Use the longest lens you own, stand at the side of the highway and focus on the front of cars coming at you and shoot so that when the film is developed you can read the license plate sharply! Now you understand the reason to be physically astute with your focusing hand and tripper finger! When you can shoot 3 or 4 rolls of 36 exposure and have 90% of them sharp, then you can blow away all the street shooting you want, as you'll be so fast people will only say, "Who was that masked photographer?" :-) Normally I do this with a 400 on tripod before going to the Olympics or some other international sports event, it fine tunes your reflexes in a hurry. And when you thought you were a fast focusing dude, this little exercise illustrates very quickly how slow you really are! ;-) But you can see yourself improve if you do it several times. (Well OK a bunch of times!) Particularly if you're a slow learner. ;-) Buy the cheapest B&W throw away film you can find simply because you'll be throwing a lot of it away! ;-) No need to make prints, you can loop them to see which ones are tack sharp, but most of the time you don't need the loop as the outies are very easy to see! :-) ted Victoria, Canada http://www.islandnet.com/~tedgrant