Street Shooter’s Exposure Table
I’ve formulated an exposure table for street shooting that turns the standard exposure table on its head.
Normally, you start with a lighting level and then you can look up a range of shutter speeds and corresponding aperture settings. That’s all well and good if you’re eyeballing light levels and setting a manual exposure, but it doesn’t reflect the way I shoot.
I walk around with a camera set at roughly the right aperture for a given environment so that I can get shutter speeds of around 1/60s to 1/500s. I also generally prefer an aperture of around f/4 to f/16 and roughly prefocus, zone focus, or focus at the hyperfocal distance. This doesn’t give the best performance that I can get out of my camera, but it does put it in a kind of sweet spot that’s very tolerant to setting errors so I can shoot thinking only of the subject and composition.
The idea of the table is to select an aperture based on the light level and film speed that will allow me to shoot at speeds of 1/60s or faster (but not faster than my shutter can go). I also indicate the hyperfocal distances for the three most common focal lengths and distance of closest acceptable focus when focusing at the hyperfocal distance.
FYI, I generally use a camera with a meter, but I can eyeball it to be close enough that the latitude of the film lets me get away with my typical margin of error.
