Fujifilm settings for street photography

Street photography punishes hesitation. The right settings are not the ones that give the best possible file: they are the ones that let you raise the camera and press the shutter without thinking about anything except the frame.

Exposure: aperture priority and a shutter floor

Put the camera in aperture priority and set f/8. That gives enough depth of field that small focus errors do not matter, and it is a sharp aperture on almost every X-mount lens.

Then set Auto ISO with a range of 160 to 6400 and a minimum shutter speed of 1/250. That floor is the important part. Left to itself the camera will happily choose 1/30 in shade and hand you a blurred picture of a person walking.

Modern Fujifilm sensors are clean at 6400. A slightly noisy sharp frame beats a clean blurred one every time.

Focus: one point, back button

Use AF-C with a single point, and move focus to the AF-ON button so the shutter release only takes pictures. Once focus and exposure are separated, you can prefocus on a spot and wait for someone to walk into it.

Face detection is worth leaving on. Modern subject detection is good enough that it helps far more often than it hurts, and you can override it with the joystick.

Zone focusing, if you want to be faster still

Switch to manual focus, set the distance to about three metres and stop down to f/8. The depth-of-field scale in the viewfinder will show roughly two to five metres in focus.

Now the camera has no focus delay at all. Anything in that band is sharp, and you shoot by judging distance rather than waiting for a confirmation beep.

This is how street photography was done for fifty years, and on a 23mm or 35mm lens it still works perfectly.

Which simulation

Classic Chrome for grey weather, concrete and architecture. It is the default answer for a reason.

Classic Negative when the street has real colour: markets, painted walls, festivals, neon.

ACROS+R in hard sunlight, when the shadows are the subject and colour is just noise.

Put all three in custom slots C1, C2 and C3 and switch by weather rather than by mood.

The rest of the setup

Turn the electronic shutter on for silence, but know that it distorts fast movement on every Fujifilm except the X-H2S. For most street work the distortion never shows.

Turn image review off. Every second spent looking at the last frame is a second not looking at the street.

Set the AF illuminator off too. A bright green light pointed at a stranger is the fastest way to end a photograph badly.