F/8 and be there

A question on the Toronto Street Photography Facebook page garnered a lot of thoughtful comment….and almost all of it of little use to the writer.

So what was the question:

What’s your go to aperture setting for street and why?

Seems simple enough right?

The photographer was asking a perfectly reasonable question to do with depth of field (what’s actually in focus in the image).

And the replies from many local photographers many of whom I admire a great deal had to do with what aperture they use when shooting street.

For the most part all of the replies were accurate and true to what I believe was the actual question. They had to do with achieving correct focus under the rushed circumstances that come with shooting in the street.

Some answers were about sensor size and the effects that has on depth of field and correct focus.

One of the more helpful replies came from a photographer who always (whenever possible) shot at f/11 and the appropriate shutter speed basically turning his camera into an expensive point-and-shoot.

Another clever reply mentioned the renouned Japanese photographer Moriyama who famously uses small sensor point-and-shoots for his minimalistic high contrast images.

But I took another route and here’s what I wrote.

See if you agree:

Whenever I see a question like this it causes me to wonder. Does the photographer understand the basics of the exposure triangle and the challenges of obtaining a proper exposure which goes beyond pointing the camera at something in the scene and accepting the light metering numbers as correct? It’s like the new rage about asking for people’s “receipes” so common now among relatively new photograpers trying to dial in a specific look to their images (and again I too think of Moriyama’s extreme high-contrast work). Now that’s not to say asking for a desired aperture number is new as we old photojournalist’s remember “F/8 and be there” often accredited to Arthur Fellig (Weegee). Having said all that wouldn’t the more helpful answer be go buy a Sekonic incident light meter 

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