I am beginning a new project that is now live on my website with an initial set of images that I will be adding to over the next year. I am going to be photographing Oxford Street in Central London, for the next year. It is a long term commitment, to a location that I am intrigued by. I did my first day of photography yesterday and got 6 images which I am sort of happy with for now. I was trying out some techinques that I intend to use for the project.

I was shooting with a Leica M9 with a 40mm f2 Summicron lens and a Voightlander finder mounted on top the camera. I set the camera aperture to f11 and iso to 320, then adjusted the shutter speed according to the amount of light, that I had to work with. I was zone focusing the camera at 4 meters, as this gave me the hyper-focal distance, I thought I would need. I quite liked using the camera this way, with the viewfinder I did not stop to focus as I was counting on the zone focusing to work for me. Things I am going to try next time are a slightly wider angle lens, as I was not close enough sometimes and other times I could not get back when I wanted to. I discovered it was easier to get into the frame than out of it so the wider lens might just do the trick. It will also give me a slightly wider zone of sharpness when using the Zone focus and I will be using the camera viewfinder, which means I can change the focus easier.