Hyperfocal
What is hyperfocal distance? Wikipedia gives two definitions:
Definition 1: The hyperfocal distance is the closest distance at which a lens can be focused while keeping objects at infinity acceptably sharp. When the lens is focused at this distance, all objects at distances from half of the hyperfocal distance out to infinity will be acceptably sharp.
Definition 2: The hyperfocal distance is the distance beyond which all objects are acceptably sharp, for a lens focused at infinity.
In a nutshell lets say I'm using a 53mm manual focus PRIME lens mounted to my camera and I manually set the focus to a set (static or permanent) distance away from me (say 15 feet away). Lets say I also want to use an f-stop of f/16 because it's a nice sunny day with average shady areas while walking down the street. The hyperfocal claculation would tell me that anything 10 feet away from my camera all the way to just over 30 feet away from my camera will be in focus. The goal is to only photograph subjects that fall within the range calculated by the hyperfocal calculation. This is a technique used by old-school street photographers who didn't want to waste time focusing, and constantly adjusting apertures when the subjects are moving. I can't tell you how many times I missed a shot with a manual focus camera because I was attempting to get a moving subject in focus. Using the hyperfocal distance will allow you more time to concentrate on framing, composition, and capturing the moment.
I was using an old rangefinder with a 24exp roll of Kodak Portra 400. I only took about 4-5 shots then gave up because my head just wasn't in the game - I was wasting shots. I guess I need to wrap the lens barrel with gaffers tape to keep from re-focusing....that's the ticket. Treating the camera as if it were a simple point-n-shoot camera but making sure subjects fall within range sounds easy but has turned out to be harder than I figured it would be.
