Turn on focus highlights or split prison or something

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.

Practice, but also zonal focussing is your friend for street with a manual lens.

Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.

Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.

The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.

One thing I like is starting the lens at infinity, or further away than I know the subject is, bringing it up to my eye while starting to rotate the lens to bring the focus closer, so you always know the subject is going to come into focus from further away. This way you don’t have to hunt back and forth, just stop turning it closer when it’s in focus and shoot.