It's interesting to know how Jeff's innocuous camera didn't have autofocus at the time, not to mention how he was doing a lot of the ISO-related math when looking to take the shot.
I've done manual black-and-white photography before with older cameras before, but I take pictures with my smartphone so freely these days it becomes hard to conceptualize the amount of work Jeff had to do.
For leisure walks with wide/normal lenses <50mm, sure.
For documentary work with an 800mm, with only ~10ft of depth of field from a couple hundreds of feet away [1], focus still matters.
You can definitely see how deep the DoF was in the shots in the article; it makes sense that Widener was more concerned about the shutter speed than the focus. I was just arguing that the zone/hyperfocal focus techniques just wouldn't be very useful here, considering he's far enough away and using an SLR. Close quarters with a manual rangefinder and "f8 and be there" would suffice.
It's astounding how difficult photography must have been back then. Today if you're trying to learn with a digital SLR you can take pictures and change aperture/focus/exposure and see the result and gain an understanding of how changing them impacts the picture.
Back then you had to take an entire roll of pictures and it'd be a long time until you could see if you were "off".
Equivalent is like the old days of punch-card programming. You'd better hope you didn't have any bugs because you wouldn't find out until much later when your job ran.
It wasn’t really that bad. It didn’t take much practice to get reasonably good results. Built-in camera metering worked well, and you got a feel for aperture vs. depth of field (sometimes that’s even marked on the lens). If you were trying for a special effect you might have to do an experimental roll, but ordinary circumstances typically “just worked”.
Punch cards, on the other hand, really were that bad. :)
I prefer a digital camera with the related speed, aperture, iso settings in physical button form. I have an old Fuji x100T that I like to use.
It's not so much just getting the math right as much as what you're giving and taking with each setting. Your camera makes the decision about what the right math is, but there's a lot of possible 'right' settings depending on the situation.
I've done manual black-and-white photography before with older cameras before, but I take pictures with my smartphone so freely these days it becomes hard to conceptualize the amount of work Jeff had to do.