I have promised the Operations Manager that I will restrain myself from puns about the Steiner brand of binoculars. They are a serious optical company and deserve my every respect. The fact that we share a name is mere coincidence. I did not, however, promise to refrain from poetry...
I always like to go to the Fujifilm equipment shows when Warrewyk Williams is in town. He's the national training manager for Fujifilm Australia and every single time he's presented a new product he's had something surprising to say about the cameras. He fills in the gaps in knowledge that even Fuji Rumours leaves open. Of course some information is not released too far ahead of time - and for good reason. There are stumbling blocks to any manufacturing and marketing exercise and making much of something that never eventuates is damaging to a firm's reputation. No names, no pack drill...
When Fujifilm decided to make their mirror-less medium format camera, the GFX50s, most people saw it as an unusual step out of line for the firm. A flouting, if you will, of their basic philosophy that used an APS-C sensor in various ways. I don't agree with this judgement, as I saw it as only a next step on from the X-T series of cameras. Utilizing a larger sensor but trying to get the same still performance as the X-T2 spread out over a larger area. I think it worked - my brief time using the larger camera in the studio showed it to be a masterful performer. The people who want that level of resolution and output have a viable alternative to much more expensive systems. But what shall we think about the Fujifilm X-H1? It's been on the market for several months and an example has just made it across the Little Studio product table today. Is it a real, new, product-that-we-all-need? Well, let's unpack it and see...
As Benny Hill once said: " If I had it to do all over again, I'd do it all over you...
Well, here's the point where I took my heart in my hand and buckled the Zonlai 22mm F1.8 onto the Fujifilm X-T2. I'd already gone through the nervous tension of dealing with some unknown organisation on eBay to acquire the lens - I'd sat wondering if anything would ever be delivered. And all the time pondering whether the money paid out was going to be worth it - whether an inexpensive eBay lens would be just junk. That's not meant to sound too pessimistic. I've had good products from eBay as well as valueless things - and as long I was prepared to write off any junk to experience, it was a fair enough amusement. I'm not sure it did not put my credit card details into the hands of scalawags but that was all part of the modern internet experience. Suffice it to say the Zonlai came through in reasonable time and was a satisfying thing to look at in the box. I got a chrome lens cap and a chromed lens hood reminiscent of the M-series Leica designs. It's a...
Good thing the Wordpress dashboard gives me enough space to list out the entire Fujifilm lens designation. A couple of centimetres more and it would be off the end of your computer and dangling over the desk. If you were reading this on the train using your mobile phone you'd be poking the passenger next to you...
That's not an alphabet - it's a lens designation. The go-to lens for most of my dance shooting and the longest optic I keep in my regular bag. It is a great big thing that gets bigger and greater as it zooms out - but as it passes the 23mm mark it is still fair game for our week's test. Okay - you'll look a bit bulky as you use it - there's a big petal lens hood on it and it extends out pretty far - but it is not all that heavy. And it does have an effective OIS to improve the sharpness of the images when you are hand-holding it. I regularly shoot wildly flailing ( I mean superbly graceful...
As photographers we're never satisfied with small and neat when big and fancy comes along. This is not an admission of guilt - it is just a fact of life. A fact that the camera and lens makers well recognise - very few of them stop at giving us just one simple black thing and then never changing it. Henry Ford does not make digital camera lenses...
Climb up with me We're going to go up the Fujifilm 23mm focal length ladder this week and you can see how difficult it is to climb. Don't be afraid of a nose bleed - 23mm isn't all that high. This enquiry was sparked by the realisation that 23mm may well be the go-to focal length for the APS-C sensor when the average shooter takes a camera out. And that there are a number of ways of getting to that number. Users of other camera systems may like to look within their own catalogues or camera bags to find similar lenses - the micro 4/3 people will need to look at about 17-18mm focal length as their nearest equivalent while the full - frame shooters will need to use 35mm lenses as their point of comparison. The thing we are achieving with a lens of this sort is very moderate wide-angle - capable of environmental portraiture as well as general coverage and landscape work. A lens that may prove to be a worker inside or outside, and it will have the advantage of...
And about. It was no good sitting in a studio shooting P-38's with this camera and lens. It'd do a perfect job insofar as the depth of field at 50mm will allow. Better to take it out into the wider world and see what a standard lens on a sensor of this quality could find. Before I went out, however, here is the Dirty Blue Bird. ETO P-38 PRU in artificial haze and turbo supercharger discharge. Never mind expensive kits - $ 19.95 and a week's work. The venue selected was nearby - the RAAF Museum in Bull Creek. It has semi-darkness, as befits a museum, back lighting from windows high up in the hangars, and a variety of colour intensities and surface reflectances - all the way from service matte to museum gloss. Plus colour temperature swings on a semi-cloudy day. What better way to test a camera that has extremely good ISO performance, large sensor, and a matrix meter. Plus there's an f 1:1.4 lens on the front. If you're a nervous flier you can wait at the souvenir counter...