The Car Barn

on June 19, 2017
I'm really doing the Royal Show people a disservice with that title. The Silver Pavilion and the Robinson Pavilion are far nicer than barns - even if they do sometimes have animals on display there. Or hot rods and custom cars, as was the case this last weekend. Apart from the one time they fired up a methanol-powered sprint car inside the main space, there were no bad smells, either. But I drift...What about the performance of the Fujinon XF16-55mm f:2.8 R LM WR lens that was the focus of the weekend's experiment? How did it perform? In three words; heavily, quietly, and accurately. I used a manual setting for both aperture ( generally f:5.6 ) and shutter speed ( 1/60 of a second ) and let the lens autofocus and the EF-X500 flash autoquench in TTL mode to balance out the ambient light. The pavilions have a mixture of daylight, halogen lighting, and light reflected off coloured walls - one entrance hallway I particularly detest has a yellow paint job on the walls that gives all the cars a jaundiced appearance... The lens rarely hunted focus - and then only when the AF point had nothing but a vast painted surface to range over. Fortunately hot rods and custom cars have chrome trim in a lot of places - or at least exotic graphics in their paint schemes. Your sensor can generally find something to bite on if your lens lets in enough light. The fact that it snapped in fast was a blessing when there were only little windows of opportunity to see the entire car between groups of gawkers. It did not make a great deal of grinding focus noise whilst doing this. Users of some other camera systems might be forgiven for thinking that they are taking pictures with a Kelvinator food mixer when their lenses start to focus - but at least they are prepared for that shock - when they mount them on their DSLR it sounds like a tunnel boring machine... The weight of the Fujinon? Well there is a lot of glass in there. And a lot of metal around it. It is not a one-handed camera when this lens is on. Be prepared and you will do fine, but you will appreciate that pint of sherry at 5:00 nevertheless. In retrospect, I wished I'd have had a lens hood on the zoom when I was out in the car park as the sun leaked into a couple of great shots. And I badly wanted a filter on the front when the cocker spaniel came up and licked the front surface of the lens. But I dried it off with an old beach towel when I got home and I don't suppose the CE shop assistants let dog slobber bother them all that much... The day's conclusion is that the lens is extremely good for this range of subjects. The 16mm end was useful when crowded into tight alleys thoug there is inevitably going to be some keystoning of the image. That doesn't really bother the car enthusaist but it does niggle at the interior photographer in me. In the worst cases I unrolled it in PSE14 but in mild ones I just ignored it. Users of the X-T series of cameras with the tilting LCD screen at the back would have been in heaven as they could have used the cameras at waist level and avoided the keystone.
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