I haven’t taken the 14mm off my X-Pro1 for a few weeks now. It’s a nice lens and I’d like to think  that I’ve been getting some pretty nice shots with it… but I want to get some even nicer ones.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been in my best state of mind lately. To make matters worse, I caught some kind of cold that’s been draining my energy these last couple of days. I’ve been trying to shoot a little bit anyways, but the results have been less than spectacular. Still, I persevere.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any street photography. I went out briefly today and I took my camera with me. After a while, I started feeling increasingly tired and unmotivated… but I still wanted to get some shots in. Since I wasn’t able to be as smooth as I might have otherwise been, I found myself doing lots of shooting from the hip.

For those of you who don’t know what that means, I was not looking through the viewfinder or at the LCD screen when shooting. Sometimes the camera was positioned at my hip, but more often than not, it was hanging around my neck and resting on my stomach. Motion was a problem.

While this is an admittedly lazy way of taking pictures, sometimes it’s necessary. That wasn’t really the case for me today, but there was another reason for my choice of such an ‘unusual’ technique. When using manual focus with the 14mm, you slide the ring back to reveal a scale. I’ve been trying to learn what works and what doesn’t – experimenting with zone focusing. As you can see from the shots below, I wasn’t always successful… and yes, I had to crop a lot. Some more thorough experimentation to follow.