Since I wear glasses, it takes a little longer for me to focus, compose and shoot a picture. If I could eliminate the focusing it would be a lot faster. Does anyone have a foolproof f stop combo that will usually keep everything in focus without having to use the focus knob all the time? I use the 35,50,24, and 75. I know the larger f stops do not allow this, but there has to be a happy medium someplace. also, i use 400 asa film. thanks

gg

-- gil garcia (gil-garcia@worldnet.att.net), September 12, 2001

Answers

It not depends of the film. I can tell you only that with 35 mm lenses if you use 22/f stop and you focus your lens at 1.85 meters (more or less 6 feet), you will have all focused from 0.9 meters until the farest thing in your picture

-- Iņigo Uriz (iso25000@yahoo.es), September 12, 2001.

I shoot with Minox 35 and Rollei 35 cameras a lot. Same thing that works with them works beautifully with a Leica M and 35mm lens ... Remember f/11 and two focus settings, 6' and 18'. On the 6' setting, 4' to 9' is in focus. On the 18' setting, 10' to infinity is in focus. I find this more flexible than just stopping down all the way to f/22.

Godfrey

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), September 12, 2001.

Would any of you find it useful if I adapted this for the Leica?

-- Lutz Konermann (lutz@konermann.net), September 13, 2001.

Lutz,

This might be useful if it were not for the fact that Leica already has very good depth of field markings on their lenses. It is much quicker to just set the lens in one step, rather than determining a range from a separate source, and then transferring that zone to the lens, which might or might not have that exact distance engraved.

Anyone that learned, really learned, on a 100 Dollar Pentax K1000 (or similar manual camera ) and an old 50mm lens can do depth of field computations on the lens... either for a specific zone or hyper focal distance. Even in this auto-everthing age, it is just not that hard to do this the old fashion way.

The graph you posted might be more useful for those 2000 Dollar wonder-plastic f/2.8 Zooms that go to 17mm or so and don't have any depth of field marks. Thank goodness Leica has not determined that we don't need these valuable marks that have been part of the thinking photographer's arsenal for decades.

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), September 13, 2001.