Gastown photo walk with the Fuji Guys...

Gallery: Gastown Photo Walk with the Fuji Guys

Pleasant company in unpleasant weather! That's how I'd describe the night out with Fujifilm, on a photo walk through Gastown in Vancouver with about 50 people and numerous Fujifilm reps, as well as Fujifilm Canada's new president. Lots of enthusiastic X-shooters turned out despite the rainy weather and, in fact, I'd say nearly all the people in the above photo were attendees. Click the image to see a gallery of 25 shots from that night...

Fujifilm's Fifty-Sixes Compared! The APD Effect…

A large version of the above here: APD-f1.2-lights.gif

Fujifilm has two versions of the their 56mm lens, the regular Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2R and the Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2R APD, one that has an internal apodization (APD) filter. Before I get into the technical lens details, let me mention that you'll see a number of animated GIFs in this blog posting that are comparisons between those two lenses wide open at f/1.2. Note that GIFs only have 256 colours in total and are dithered to allow them to display a 24-bit colour image. This dithering can be visible as some roughness or even slight banding in these animations. Also, for those who just want to dive in and look at images, here is a link to the full gallery with all the photos mentioned in this posting, each carefully shot at seven different f-stops with both lenses - 70 images in total!

Gallery: Fujifilm's Fifty-Sixes Compared! The APD Effect…

I chose to test the lenses at third-stops from f/1.2 to f/2 and then go right to f/2.8 and finally f/4 since the effect becomes so minimal once you stop down past f/2.0. The photos in the sample gallery were all shot on a tripod, with the two 56mm lenses changed carefully as to not move the camera. For some reason, I did notice a hint of movement on some sets that was likely my forgetting to sufficiently tighten the panning-lock on my ball-head, however, there was definitely a distinctly different "aim" to both 56mm lenses, something I found a bit unusual. Even though the shift was only slight, it was bothersome enough that on all the photo groups, I carefully cropped them ever so slightly, then nudged the crop frames around until I got the best superposition of the regular set with the APD set. While this was rather tedious, luckily Lightroom made it fairly painless. Once I had the f/1.2 versions aligned, I could just sync the crop settings on each group of smaller f-stops.

In order to show some of the bokeh effects more obviously, I heavily cropped two sets in the gallery, namely photos 15-28 and 57-70. On those, the frame you see is roughly a third the area of the whole field-of-view. All the others only have a tiny bit of cropping, just enough so I could achieve perfect alignment of each set of shots, well almost perfect at least. Lastly, there was some movement of branches due to wind, especially in photos 43-56.

For some less technical and more aesthetic samples, see this blog posting from a week earlier...

Post: Nicole with the Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2R APD

So, now for some details of what makes Fujifilm's 56mm APD lens (almost) unique...

Gallery: Nicole with the Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2R APD

Gallery: Nicole with the Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2R APD

Fujifilm Canada was kind enough to recently lend me both variations of their 56mm lenses, the XF 56mm f/1.2R and the XF 56mm f/1.2R APD. What the term "APD" stands for, is that variant's internal apodization filter, essentially an inbuilt radial ND filter that is darkest at the outer edge and feathers to clear part way in towards the centre. The effect this has, is to smooth out the transitional edges of the out-of-focus areas of an image and has its strongest effect wide open at f/1.2. I will go into more detail in a future blog entry that will also have some animations, comparing both 56mm lenses at various f-stops.

For now, if you click on the above image, you'll get a gallery of images of my colleague Nicole, all shot handheld at night with my X-E2 and the 56mm APD wide open at f/1.2. Hopefully this will give you a feel for how the lens will perform in some situations and whether or not the "look" is worth the price premium over the regular 56mm. If I was a regular portrait shooter, I would definitely have to strongly consider this lens since I feel it does perform very nicely in that capacity. Some more technical details of how the images were shot are in the gallery's introduction as well.

Finally, this gallery is the first of 2015 and will represent a slightly new look. All previous galleries linked from my blog basically appeared as though on my regular www.sublimephoto.com website, however the sad truth is that I have not updated the gallery link pages on my website since 2009! I am way behind and since I have been posting all my galleries in recent years as links from my blog, I thought it appropriate to have the galleries appear more integral to the blog, with the same banner, links back to the originating blog posting (the -back to post- link you'll see at the top centre of each gallery) and so on. Also there will be a link to allow you to see all galleries posted for the year the gallery you are currently in was posted, for example the "2015 Image Galleries". At some point I do plan on updating my website, but in reality it might all end up being integrated with either this blog, or perhaps even a newly designed one. For now, hopefully this is a slight improvement...

Gallery: Testing the Fujifilm 50-140mm f/2.8 Zoom

Gallery: Testing the Fujifilm 50-140mm f/2.8 Zoom

I finally had a chance to really put the new Fujifilm XF 50-140mm f/2.8R LM OIS WR zoom lens through its paces on this past Christmas day. For some weird reason, I had thought the gallery was already posted to my blog, since I had uploaded it shortly after Christmas, but obviously I hadn't - oops! In any case, you've probably already seen my preview blog posting of this lens at this link here, but for that one, I only had the lens briefly and took maybe a dozen shots with it. On the 25th, I took nearly 300 shots and you can see some of the selected images in the gallery you can get to by clicking on the above image. The high-res images are nice and big, 3000 pixels in the long dimension, so you can get a better idea of how good the image quality is on a wider range of shots.

My conclusions hold by and large: the new professional zoom from Fujifilm is spectacularly sharp, focuses very quickly and has effective image stabilization. On my X-E2, with the added Fujifilm handgrip, I actually didn't find it to be unpleasantly heavy, although it is certainly a large lens. Following are some additional comments about this lens, now that I have tested it more thoroughly. 

Happy New Year! And some images...

The last rays of sunlight fall on Vancouver, on New Year's Eve 2014, shot from the Granville Street Bridge. There is a gallery of images from the beautiful afternoon of December 31st, which you can get to by clicking on the above image, where my first gallery of 2015 shows my very last photos of 2014...

I had used the opportunity to shoot with the new Sony A7 Mark II and most of the images in the gallery were taken with Sony's new Zeiss 16-35mm f/4 OSS, a body and lens I had not yet really had much of a chance to test out yet. I also shot with a few other lenses and the below image of the moon is a 100% crop from Lightroom, showing how impressively sharp Sony's 70-200mm f/4 OSS for the FE mount is. It was also an exceptionally clear evening, which helped too...

Preview: Fujifilm XF 50-140mm f/2.8R LM OIS WR Zoom

(click on above image to open a high-res version in a new window)

I recently had an opportunity to briefly test Fujifilm's new professional level zoom, equivalent to a 75-210mm in full-frame terms. I tested it on my X-E2 body but above, you can see it mounted to an X-T1. While the lens is indeed quite large and has substantial mass, it is actually not as heavy as it looks, in other words, its density doesn't seem all that high, a welcome fact thankfully. I have Fujifilm's extra hand-grip on my X-E2 and with it, I found the lens fairly well balanced and easy to handhold.

This is constant aperture f/2.8 zoom with a properly marked aperture ring on the lens, a first for Fujifilm zooms and hopefully the beginning of a future trend! It has a linear-motor (LM) for fast and quiet focusing, it boasts weather-resistant (WR) construction and has an optical image stabilizer (OIS) that is rated for 5-stops of extra stability. The tripod mount is detachable with two thumbscrews but it is also a nice way to carry the lens with attached body, to avoid stress on the body's lens mount from the relatively heavy lens.

The lens is beautifully constructed with a fully internal zoom mechanism and a silky smooth zoom ring with absolutely consistent tension that doesn't get tight anywhere within its range or towards either end of the zoom. In addition, it has a perfect feeling aperture ring with nice, crisp detents and excellent tension. In terms of its mechanical operation, it may just be the nicest feeling lens so far for Fujifilm's X-system. Personally, I take great pleasure in the mechanical and tactile feel of a camera's controls, one of the attractions of Fujifilm's X-system for me, and this lens absolutely does not disappoint. Finally, even the lens hood is thoughtfully designed, with a small slide-out portal that allows one to adjust a polarizing filter when the hood is mounted.

Close Encounter...

I was up on Grouse Mountain yesterday with some friends and came the closest I have ever been to a grizzly bear. Yes, a close encounter... but fortunately not a dangerous one! The above is a photo of Grinder, a rescued grizzly bear at the Grouse Mountain Refuge for Endangered Wildlife. We were given a private tour by Devin Manky and besides seeing the two resident grizzlies, we also spent some time with Cleo, a barn owl.

Gallery: Grouse Mountain - Nov 1st

Desert Southwest - Oct. 2014 - 100 Selected Images...

Tower Arch - Klondike Bluffs, Arches National Park, Utah

In mid October I was off once again to the US desert southwest, this time in hopes of finding some fall colours and I am pleased to say that I did! Stormy skies at the start, amazingly warm with sunny blue skies during the latter half of the trip, and some stunningly clear days in between with distant vistas virtually unobstructed by haze… lots of great photo opportunities were had. The image gallery contains 100 selected images, a quick initial rough edit through all the shots so I have something to show friends, family and colleagues. Either click the image above or the link below and enjoy...

Gallery: October 2014 / US Southwest - 100 Selected

Fusion 2014 and PHOTO Graphie

If you haven't checked out the great list of speakers that will be at Beau Photo's Fusion 2014 show, you should! While the focus is still of DSLR video, this year there are other more photographically oriented talks as well. In addition, the trade show will feature exciting new products from Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Hasselblad, Sony plus others like Sennheiser, Steadicam, Profoto, K5600 and many more.

Yes, you read that right... SONY is listed too. Beau Photo Supplies is now a Sony dealer and soon they will have stock to sell and also be well-equipped with Sony rental gear, including the amazing new A7S full-frame mirrorless camera, the king of low-light filming that can shoot up to a nearly unimaginable ISO 409,600 - yes, over four hundred thousand! The compact A7S is capable of 4K video and with lens adapters, can use most lenses from Canon and Nikon as well. Beau Photo will also have numerous high quality Carl Zeiss and Sony primes and zooms available to rent, as well as the 36MP A7R, the SLT-A77 Mark II DSLR, the NEX A6000 and also the compact RX10 with a 1" sensor, capable of very high quality video and equipped with a fixed Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 24-200mm equivalent, constant aperture f/2.8 stabilized zoom.

For more info on Fusion 2014 click here: Fusion 2014 Info

Gallery: Fraser Canyon in Late June...

At the end of June, I went on a four day camping trip with a friend and enjoyed the gorgeous weather and beautiful scenery along the Thompson River north of Lytton, BC. I shot with my Fujifilm X-E2 kit but also had a Sony A7R system along for testing. Those photos will come in a future blog entry but there are a couple at the end of the gallery, taken on the last day. Driving back to Vancouver was the main goal that day, but I did stop near Lytton to take a few shots and only used the A7R at that stop.

In case anyone is wondering, the second shot in the gallery was light painted with a couple of green lasers and a flashlight, frantically lighting stuff up during the 30 second exposure. There was a dim flashlight switched on inside the tent as well. It took quite a few attempts before I was happy with how the tops of the grass looked with the laser illumination! For the gallery, click on the above image or...

Gallery link: Fraser Canyon in Late June