The Ricoh GR snap focus is the whole reason the camera exists, as far as I am concerned. Preset a distance, and the camera fires instantly with everything in focus at that range. No hunting, no missing the moment.
There is just one problem if you grew up in America. The distances are in meters. I do not think in meters. I think in feet, like a normal person who has never once estimated a meter correctly in his life.
So here is what I did. I memorized two distances in feet and stopped worrying about the rest. Roughly three feet for close-up chaos, and about eight feet for general street range. That is it. Everything else is fiddling.
Snap focus is not about precision, it is about speed. Set it, stop down a little for depth of field, and shoot. If your subject is somewhere in the neighborhood of your preset distance, you are sharp. If not, you still probably got the moment, which beats a perfectly focused picture of nothing.
The GR rewards people who stop overthinking. Pick a distance in feet, go shoot.
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