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Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

> As a comparison point, many people shoot street photography "from the hip", aiming the camera at the rough spot they want to get with a forgiving aperture setting (around 8 or more).

Interesting you say this as I have been on my photography journey these last 2 years and keep hearing the opposite opinion: People "cheating" by using a low aperture so they don't have to think about the entire composition as it gets blurred out.

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Because street photography is very spontaneous it’s pretty common practice to set an aperture of 8 and just snap away - it’s a helpful trick for rangefinder cameras that often take some time to pull focus.

For those who want to know the science behind : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

Its cheating because you don't have to think about focusing your lens. At f/8 you have a reasonable hyper-local distance, and so for instance everything from 2m to infinity is sufficiently sharp.

This kind of advice was given before the advent of good enough autofocus where indeed you've rely on the machine to focus your imagine. But at the same time you delegate the choice of the subject to the machine instead of spontaneously capturing "everything".

Hyperfocal. Not hyper-local.

Indeed, my autocorrect and lack of rereading is to blame.

i'm not sure you can call the ethos of "f8 and be there" cheating when it's how every major street photographer operated

Small F/ number = high-aperture.

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