F8 and be there

F8 and be there

F8 and hyperfocal distance

American photographer Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig used f8 all the time, ignoring the Sunny 16 rules for all of his greatest pictures. "F8 and be there" is a quote attributed to him. But what does it mean?
Quite simply it's a further simplification of the sunny 16 rule, but it has other tricks up its sleeve.
F8 is considered the best aperture to use as most lenses perform their best at that aperture. Use f8 in every situation and the latitude of the film will cover any over/under exposure. This is exactly how box cameras work. A box camera has a fixed shutter speed of around 1/30-1/60 and a fixed aperture of f11 or f16 and generations of families got perfectly acceptable photographs with them. Box cameras were fixed focus too, the lens being positioned so that it focused just shy of infinity. The f11 or f16 aperture would ensure enough depth of field to cover middle distance to infinity with the pictures being acceptably sharp.
This is the hyperfocal distance. On the image at the top of this page you can see that the 35mm lens is focused at approximately 5 metres / 15 feet. If you look, the infinity mark is at f8 on the depth of field scale. So according to the lens everything between 2.5m to infinity will be acceptably sharp. This depth increases with wider lenses. With a 28mm lens it will be wider and with a 50mm lens it's shallower.
So, stick your lens at the hyperfocal distance, the shutter speed at 1/ISO and lens at f8 and shoot. It works well with digital too.

Some of Weegee's pictures taken at f8