The Exact Zone Focusing Settings a Street Photographer Uses for Four Lenses

Zone focusing is one of the fastest ways to shoot on the street, and most people either don't know how to set it up or don't trust it enough to actually use it. Jeff Ascough has built his entire street shooting practice around it, skipping autofocus almost entirely in favor of pre-set distances and depth of field.

Coming to you from Walk Like Alice, this practical video walks through Jeff Ascough's specific zone focusing settings for four focal lengths: 21mm, 28mm, 35mm, and 50mm. He shoots on 35mm film and with a Leica Monochrom with 18 megapixels, so his threshold for acceptable sharpness reflects that. If you're shooting with a high-resolution sensor, say 60 megapixels, the soft edges of a depth of field zone become more visible, and you may need to stop down further to compensate. Ascough also points out that some cameras, like the Leica M11, let you shoot at a lower resolution setting, which can make zone focusing more forgiving without changing the actual depth of field. The physical lens itself matters too: larger lenses tend to have more readable distance scales, and Ascough shows a side-by-side comparison of a 28mm Elmarit against a 28mm Summicron to illustrate exactly how much that readability difference can affect how quickly you can work.

For the 21mm, Ascough sets focus to 6 ft at f/8, which gets him from 3 ft to infinity. The 28mm sits at 12 ft at f/8 for a zone stretching from 6 ft to infinity, or 6 ft at f/8 when he wants to work closer, giving him 4 ft to 12 ft. His 35mm Summilux settings mirror the 28mm almost exactly, which he says is largely a result of muscle memory from years of using the 35mm first and then carrying those habits over. The depth of field is slightly narrower on the 35mm, so there's a little less margin for error, but the approach is the same. One of his more interesting points is about marking your lens barrel when the distance you need isn't printed on the scale. He references Cartier-Bresson doing exactly this and describes using a small piece of Scotch tape and a silver Sharpie to add a temporary mark without damaging the lens.

The 50mm section is worth watching on its own. Ascough actually uses zone focusing with a 50mm lens, which surprises a lot of people, and his reasoning about why it works at greater distances is worth hearing directly from him. He also switches from feet to meters on that lens because of where the markings fall on the barrel, which is a small but telling detail about how much the physical mechanics of the lens shape the way he shoots.

Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Ascough, including his two working settings for the 50mm and when he decides to abandon zone focusing altogether.