I have a 50mm prime lens that’s really awful at focusing. How do I learn to manually focus for street photography?
I’ve never seen an AF lens with distance scales that were worth a crap. Especially if you’re trying to do it with a focus-by-wire lens that has no actual physical connection to the elements.
The classic method for street photography was zone focusing anyway, so you’d set your focus distance a certain ways out (or at hyperfocal, so everything beyond a certain line was in focus out to infinity), usually stopped down to increase the plane of focus.
For street photography a good technique is zone focusing. For example F8 on a 35mm you can pre-set your focus to 8 ft which means that everything from about 5-1/2ft to 15ft away will be in focus. No waiting for your auto-focus to catch the subject, as long as they are withing the zone, it will be in focus.
Here is a site that explains this technique in better detail