Field One manual

Shutter speed is set on the dial on the top plate, aperture on the ring at the front of the lens, and ISO with the wheel under your right thumb. Exposure compensation sits beside the shutter button. The Fn button on the back turns Wi-Fi on when held, and locks exposure when pressed.

Nothing else changes while you shoot. Settings you choose once, like the file format, colour profile and auto ISO limit, are set in the Halde app or from a text file on the card.

Set the shutter dial to A and the camera picks the shutter speed for the aperture you’ve chosen. Turn it to a speed and you’re in manual: the finder shows a simple meter, a dot that moves left for under and right for over.

With ISO on Auto, the camera keeps the shutter speed at or above one over twice the focal length (1/60 for the 35 mm) and raises ISO up to the limit you set, 6400 by default.

Look at the bright patch in the centre of the finder. Turn the focus tab until the two images in the patch line up into one. That’s it: the lens is focused on whatever is in the patch.

For zone focusing, set a distance on the scale and an aperture, and everything in the marked zone will be sharp. Our journal post on zone focusing explains it with examples.

The bright frame shows what the 35 mm lens sees, and moves slightly as you focus to correct for parallax at close distances. Below the frame, a line of small lights shows the shutter speed, the meter and a level. They only light when you half-press, so the finder stays clear while you compose.

Hold Fn for two seconds to turn on Wi-Fi, then open the app. You can browse and copy photos, set the date and time, choose raw, JPEG or both, pick a colour profile and set your auto ISO limit. The camera turns Wi-Fi off after five minutes without a connection.

Field One is gasketed against dust, sand and light rain, but it isn’t waterproof. After a day at the beach or in the desert, blow the sand out of the dials before you turn them. If it gets wet, dry it with a soft cloth and leave the battery door open for an hour. Clean the lens with a blower first, then a microfibre cloth.

For storage longer than a month, charge the battery to about half and keep it in the camera, switched off, somewhere dry and air-conditioned, never in a parked car in summer. Have the rangefinder checked every few years, or after a hard knock.