One thing I dislike about nearly all the "focus-by-wire" lenses out on the market is the inability of the user to set the lens to a specific distance without having to bring the camera to your eye, focus it, lock focus and then wait for your subject to be in the optimal spot. Especially frustrating when it comes to street shooting or discreet photography where pre-focusing on a certain distance can be very effective.
Remember the days of manual focus lenses? They had distance scales on them, long focus throws, and detailed depth of field scales. You could set your 24mm lens to something like ten feet, set your aperture to f11 and be sure of getting good sharpness from 7.94 feet to 18.04 feet. Or somewhere in the very close ballpark.
Not so with all the enormously expensive and oversized lenses we now have offered to us for our modern cameras. Big use-ability steps backwards at many turns. At least for people who like to zone focus, pre-focus or use the idea of hyper-focal distance setting.
I'm not sure how Sony, Fuji, Canon or Nikon deal with this but there is a nice solution for Leica SL, SL2 and SL2-S users. If they are using L system lenses on their cameras and they set their lens to manual focus then a half press on the shutter brings up a nice graphic on the camera's top screen. If you've set the aperture to a specific f-stop as you turn the lens focusing ring the display will read out the exact focused distance, the focus behind the point of sharpest focus that will still be acceptable (back), and the distance at which the system will still be in focus in front of the camera (front).
I tested this feature out again today. It works with native Leica SL lenses, Panasonic L mount lenses and Sigma L mount lenses. I don't know if other camera makers offer the same feature or something similar but for people who like to, want to, or have to manually focus anything less is a deal-killer. Yep. Deal-Killer.
This isn't "new tech." In the M Leica world this sort of necessary and helpful information was right there on the lens for immediate visual access. And in fairness it was on all camera makers' manual focus lenses back in the day. The disconnection started with AF systems and got progressively worse in the digital age.
Sure, Fuji and Sigma make lenses with manual aperture rings but few of them have marked distance scales and even fewer have depth of field marketings for the most used apertures. Panasonic and Olympus and Fuji make a few lenses with clutches that put the lens into a fully manual mode with hard stops at both ends of the scale and good distance and depth of field scales. That's the way to handle it on the lens side of the equation.
But for all the other lenses the Leica SL, introduced in 2015, set the standard for this kind of usability feature.
Not trying to be a brand champion here but I will say it's a feature I can see all kinds of use for in practice. Especially with the wider lenses.
The perfect reason to buy a $7000 Leica SL2 body? Maybe not quite. But if you are locked into a system that doesn't have this feature, or something similar, you might consider banding together with other like minded users and starting a letter writing campaign. It might just work.
Added: A decent article about hyperfocal distance measuring and implementation.... https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/calculating-hyperfocal-distance-in-photography
15 comments:
This is one of the reasons I've been having so much fun with my new Voigtlandar APO-Lanthar 35mm f2 (Z mount). A good distance scale combined nice manual focus feel. For my style of shooting, mostly f8-f11, it's simple to get sharp shots. But the digital scale looks cool. I think the GR might have a similar trick in manual focus mode, I forget.
One of the MAJOR reasons I still use my old Nikkor MF lenses. Can't live without those pretty coloured lines on the lenses.
Nearly every Pentax camera has this function. It is called "Catch-in focus" and works best with old manual focus lenses. After all these years, it remains magical to hear the camera click, when the subject enters in the prefocussed area! It is the main reason I've kept my old Pentax glass.
Filip
That’s a neat feature! Would love to see Fujifilm implement something similar, though I suppose it requires a top lcd which only he GFX and X-H series offer.
Excellent - I had no idea that this feature existed even though I've owned an SL for almost 18 months now!
Amen. I recently bought an Olympus E-M1 Mark 2 and it has a feature called Preset MF. I haven't had time to use it, but it seems to be a way to set a focus distance and have the focus-by-wire system lock in. I may be wrong about how it works. Imo, these things are examples of the proper use of on-board CPUs, i.e., to do things that we cannot easily do ourselves, which is the whole point of a "tool".
On the Sigma fp, menu>shoot>focus[still]>3>MF display [still] can be set to ‘focus distance’, either meters or feet. Then with my Panasonic lens set to MF, when I touch the focusing ring, the distance is displayed on lower right corner in feet and inches. Pretty cool.
Very cool, Greg, I didn't know about that. I'll try it right after breakfast!!!
Greg, Thanks! Works great in conjunction with focus magnification.
Interesting. I don't think I have ever used the DOF scales on lenses to any significant extent, or I did when I first started photography, but very soon I decided to focus on the subject of interest (as that will be th only thing truly sharp) and generally just pick the "right" aperture for depth of focus. If you are on a tripod then you just pick the one that you can get away with without major diffraction issues, or you pick one for shallow focus. Off the tripod the same considerations apply, except you have to consider your shutter speed and image stabilization capabilities more. Generally, for this kind of thing I just take a sequence at different apertures if I really don't know. The biggest issue I find is what is the widest aperture that gives the best result, and it is often not the widest. My Olympus PRO lenses have nice depth of field scales. The Leica implementation does look cool though, personally, I can't really imagine using it, now that it is so easy to take a bracketed series.
It would seem to be a trivial thing to implement since all modern cameras have a chip inside. Make it visible in the viewfinder.
If matrix meter can call up a database of images for comparison why not compute the hyperfocal distance and display ( at least when you are in MF mode?
Seems that if you can do focus peaking why not?
I don't know if the most recent Fuji X100V has this but the older models had a visible focus scale in the viewfinder when in manual focus. It was a bar visible in the viewfinder that indicated range of focus depending upon aperture. It worked really well, exactly the same as the markings on the old mf lenses in practice. Very easy to use. This feature should be included in all cameras.
my samyang 12mm is great for hyperfocal, I struggled with it for a long time, always getting blurry images but hyperfocal at 5.6 or so is just peachy
The Fuji X100V has the same features that crsantin mentioned and the focus bar is also visible when using the Optical View Finder.
While not quite the same, I wish Canon would bring back their DEP mode. Not the useless A-DEP on their cameras. Might be a good thing on other cameras. Focus on the near boundary for your depth of field, then focus on the far boundary. After the that the camera comes up with a focus distance and aperture that gives you the desire depth of field. Compose and take the photo. Granted, the subject might not fall on the focus plane for some photos. But for other subjects you get all of the subject in the depth of field and know anything in front or behind starts to noticeably go out of focus.
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