I have a 50mm prime lens that’s really awful at focusing. How do I learn to manually focus for street photography?
Practice, but also zonal focussing is your friend for street with a manual lens.
Get an old school manual film camera. My husband bought me an old Pentax a few years back. The way the camera focused with the view finder was really awesome. It was the coolest gift. I’m sad it ended up breaking pretty quick tho. may look into getting another one just for fun.
Turn on focus highlights or split prison or something
For street photography a good technique is zone focusing. For example F8 on a 35mm you can pre-set your focus to 8 ft which means that everything from about 5-1/2ft to 15ft away will be in focus. No waiting for your auto-focus to catch the subject, as long as they are withing the zone, it will be in focus.
Here is a site that explains this technique in better detail
I’ve never seen an AF lens with distance scales that were worth a crap. Especially if you’re trying to do it with a focus-by-wire lens that has no actual physical connection to the elements.
The classic method for street photography was zone focusing anyway, so you’d set your focus distance a certain ways out (or at hyperfocal, so everything beyond a certain line was in focus out to infinity), usually stopped down to increase the plane of focus.