Pine Street Woods and a New Lens

As reported earlier I took the plunge and bought the largest and most expensive lens I have ever owned. It is the GF500 f5.6 which works with my GFX50s ii digital camera from Fujifilm.

These are my first images and some comments on my first experience.

My camera body is an earlier generation 50 mega-pixel version with limited autofocus capability (contrast only, no phase detect). This has suited me well as I use old manual focus lenses. This has been quite successful and economical as well.

In summary I like the new lens. The autofocus speed is tolerable for landscape work (the speed is entirely down to the camera body) . I have difficulty with autofocus lenses on most cameras as they often don’t focus on what I intend. In many cases I have switched to manual focus which works well on this lens.

I was out at sunrise this morning and the light was often minimal. I also shot everything handheld. This meant every photo was taken at f5.6 and around ISO 400. Shutter speeds ran from 1/9 to 1/60 of a second.

The lens is about 3 lbs and I was concerned about the carry weight. I use a Peak Design Capture clip on my camera and backpack strap as shown. I really like the product as it keeps the camera handy and my hands free while I am walking.

The new lens camera combination worked extremely well with the Ca[ture clip during two hours of walking up and down hills. I am aware of the extra weight but it was comfortable. The camera and lens can be put in and out of the clip easily.

While taking photos the camera and lens are well balanced and never seemed awkward or tiring while focusing and composing and image. The lens is ridiculously large though.

These first three images (click to enlarge) show some distant mountains from this morning. They progress from earlier to later so we are moving from blue hour hence the color shift. I applied a little warm tone correction to tone down the deep blue but it was applied consistently on all images. Some contrast and brightness changes complete the edits. These are from JPEGS with the Classic Chrome film simulation. They have been rescaled to 1920 pixels across.

From the crop above the sharpness is apparent (f5.6 ISO 640 1/45 sec shutter speed). The narrow depth of field is apparent on the left side of the crop above as it gets softer on the left.

For the first day out I was pleased. The lens does bring the subject very close for landscape work. For the mountains above it gave too tight isolation for some images.

Like any new lens it will take some time, thought, and work find the sweet spot for images.