New Lens
Fuji GF 500mm f5.6
I took the plunge and bought this monster from Fujifilm. My ethos to date was to use older manual lenses from Olympus and Mamiya adapted to my Fuji GFX50s ii camera I bought used a couple of years ago.
Warning this is quite a long post about lenses and justification of spending a lot of money on a new lens. This is not everyone’s cup of tea. I will post some follow up items with examples and what my experience has been like with this lens.
Lately I wanted to shake up my photography and have enjoyed longer lenses for my landscape and intimate landscape photography. I have a 150mm f3.5 Mamiya lens which has been a bit of a workhorse. A few years ago I bought a Mamiya mount 2x teleconverter and the 300mm f7 result added some new capability to my Mamiya 645. This naturally carried over to my Fuji GFX digital setup. However the image quality was not that much different from the 150mm cropped for the 300mm field of view even with a 50Mpix sensor.
Doug Morse
Manual Alternative
Fujifilm announced the GF500mm f5.6 this past fall and I just keep coming back to thinking about it. It is possible to find that long of a lens in manual focus. Mamiya made a couple of 500mm and one at f5.6. That lens goes for around $350 used on eBay and other sites so this is an option for the budget minded. What swayed me to the Fuji lens was they reportedly did such an excellent job on this one.
The Mamiya lens at f5.6 weighs 2.28 kg or about 5 lbs. (There is an f4.5 version that is 5.5 kg or 12 lbs!) The Fuji version is 1.38 kg or about 3 lbs. This is due to less metal and needing to cover a smaller image circle. (The Fuji GF500mm is actually slightly lighter than the GF 250mm f4 lens from Fuji.) There is about a 100mm/4 inch difference in length between the Mamiya and Fuji as well. The focus distance of the Mamiya is 9m/30 ft vs 2.75m/8.5 ft. for the GF500 which is much better for intimate landscape work. The Fuji GF500 seems truly impressive but so is the price at $3,500.
Most of my shooting is handheld while hiking so weight becomes an issue. I am not sure if this is going to be light enough to be comfortable but the reviewers seem to think so. Because I go handheld the image stabilization is critical and the camera and lens can team up to deliver impressive results.
Overall the image quality seemed superior as well. The Fuji GF500 fully open at f5.6 looks like it delivers very usable image quality. The Mamiya is very soft wide open. This is important as I often shoot wide open for good bokeh. I have two lenses with different image quality when used wide open. One is a Mamiya 55-100mm f4.5 zoom lens. Very heavy ( at 1.1kg/2.4 lb it weighs almost as much at the Fuji GF500 lens.) and while versatile, it is not as sharp as my Olympus 135mm f2.8 lens. I like the zoom but being slow and having a barely useable wide aperture image quality makes it limited in use.
Autofocus
Time will tell if I use autofocus. I don’t tend to on my only other Fuji lens, the 30-70mm ‘kit lens’. I have gotten used to manual focus and so don’t know how to use all the autofocus features effectively. I also own the GFX 50s ii body which only has contrast detection autofocus which is slow and prone to error. Focussing manual is not a problem for most of my landscape work.
I do intend to shoot some wildlife when I see it but this isn’t really my thing… yet. I may find myself doing more wildlife with this lens however and I look forward to seeing how the lens changes my work. It is entirely possible that I will do enough wildlife photography that I will want the newer GFX 100s ii body and superior autofocus which will then make this an extremely expensive lens indeed!
Telephoto
Many landscape photographers use a telephoto lens for intimate work and even broader landscapes. The ability to separate out part of the scene with a long lens can be helpful and there is some good bokeh to be had as well even at f5.6. I also live and explore some big country here in Idaho and I keep thinking a longer lens would change my take on the landscape.
It was difficult to find many videos on landscape using this lens but I did find this one. It is kind of a review but does show some initial results. Most videos I found were either reviews with the usual talking points or wildlife photography. All of the reviews seemed to also include the GFX100s ii which was released at the same time so the reviews don’t help much with understanding what limitations my camera body may give.
The lens itself has very few use cases and this might cause me to regret the purchase. Most of the above is probably me justifying an expense lens that I was lusting after.
Expect to see some results and comments once the lens arrives.
