Thought zone focus was just a gimmick until I saw the grain on a 40 year old print
I always skipped zone focus cameras because I figured autofocus got good enough by the 90s, so why bother. Last week my neighbor pulled out a box of prints her dad shot in 1983 at a county fair in Modesto, all with a little Olympus XA he carried in his shirt pocket. Every frame was sharp where it mattered, and the grain just glowed. I asked her how he got so many keepers, and she said he set the lens at about 8 feet and shot everything from there. That one number, 8 feet, made me rethink my whole thing. I ran 2 rolls through my own XA2 at a farmers market on Saturday and got 14 good frames out of 24, which beats my usual. Now I want to know, do you zone folks have a default distance you just live at, or does it change with the light?