Congrats on the Fuji purchase. I love my XT-30.
This is a fun walking-around lens: Fujifilm XF 27mm f/2.8 Review
But, it looks like this is on the way, with an aperture ring!
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1618892-REG/fujifilm_16670168_xf_27mm_f_2_8_r.html
Tempting, tempting.
Funny you should tempt me! Not 5 minutes before I opened SDMB, I ordered a Fujifilm XF 27mm f/2.8 R WR. Aperture ring, and weather resistance too. They’re out there! Took a while to find one - Amazon, B&H, Adorama did not have them, but I found a place that did. Dodd Camera.
And the camera and the macro lens have arrived! I just unboxed them and put the camera on the charger.
This would have been about 15 years, so I can’t say what technological advances may have resolved issues. I think they figured if you tried it in one pass (one three-hour exposure) or if ou were going to shoot a few hundred consecutive shots, the heat would add up either way. Resolution, color shift, whatever, I’m not sure what else may have suffered.
We were talking about the old diopter thing. As far as old filters go, I found that they created weird purple fringing in pictures. But give them a try if you still have them lying around.
Dang! I need to get some new gear!
You do! You’ve been too hard on yourself, and it’s time you invest a little more in your interests. Anybody gets in the way, you tell them I said so.
I’m pretty jealous. I have the old one, without the ring. Is it that much cooler to be able to use the aperture ring instead of the front dial? Yes. Yes it is.
[quote=“Napier, post:44, topic:961175”]
You do! You’ve been too hard on yourself, and it’s time you invest a little more in your interests. Anybody gets in the way, you tell them I said so.[/quote]
Many many many years ago, my older brother got a cheesy BW darkroom setup from Sears. I don’t think it printed bigger than 3x5. He found an old Brownie camera lying around, got some film, and took some pretty cool shots. Like get someone to stand on the bumper of a car, back off several feet, have another person in the foreground position the hand just so and…forced perspective! Or the one where he carefully shot several photos, printed the photos, and made a panorama when he taped them together. Brilliant! The first time I saw an image come up in the developer, I was hooked.
Well, we were younger. I think it’s true though that there should be a balance. Gear can get in the way, make you push your creativity aside and look for a widget instead of thinking. On the other hand, if you’re stuck with a Brownie, how far can you really go?
When I got into digital I bristled at the idea of relinquishing focus, but as my visual acuity fades I mind it less.
And when you don’t have to pay for the film and developing or printing, you can shoot an awful lot. That’s been valuable. I once calculated that from buying film to holding the prints in hand, each cost me 25 cents. In digital I was shooting tons because it didn’t cost, and that practice has helped a lot. If you know the buttons to press you can access shutter release figures. I think I shot 200K pics in about six years.
I have learned that most of my images will live on computer, so razor sharp resolution or whatever aren’t as critical. 've also learned that my cell phone camera is shitty. In the back of my mind, the longer I wait to upgrade photo equipment, the bigger the gains will be. So when I do get a new camera, it’s epic.
There is something to that, yes – but the price to accomplish the camera body keeps going down relative to what it does. I’m not aware the same is true of lenses, but they’re probably not changing much, either. So, you might like to get a modest new body thinking you might well upgrade it later, and also get a few lenses that you think you’ll keep a long time.
I’m thinking this about the mirrorless mounts especially, as the mount is new, but is likely to last a long time. And, optically, having a wider mount much closer to the focal plane is just plain helpful.
Go on, you’ll be glad you did.
Yeah, if I’m understand the post correctly, the state of camera bodies now is such that there really isn’t much point to waiting. My main bodies are 7-plus-year-old D750s. I can happily live out the rest of my career with those cameras. I used to upgrade bodies every three years. The improvements have slowed down–hell, my Z6ii doesn’t, at least according to DxO Mark have any more dynamic range than the D750 and only modest improvement in high ISO shooting.
Now, yes, mirrorless has changed a number of things about cameras a bit, and there is some room for improvement there yet (a lot you can get through firmware updates, yay!), but image quality isn’t much different than cameras of the D750’s era. If you buy a current camera, I suspect you should be happy with it for the next 5-10 years, if not forever. The quality is just that good on those things these days. If you are constantly pushing what is possible and working on the edges of a camera’s performance envelope, sure, every incremental improvement will be worth considering. But for your average shooter and even typical pro? Today’s equipment is more than enough. If you’re not getting good shots, or the shots you want, 99% of the time it is not the fault of the camera.
What I would really like to do is buy three.
I like to carry two with my harness.
Very often I’ll have my 18-36EFL on one body and my 80-300EFL on the other. That eliminates a lot of lens changes, takes the strain off my neck, probably makes them harder to steal. Mrs. L also likes to take pictures, so I’ll give her a camera, usually with the 28-108EFL.
The problems: the camera she uses requires a compact flash card for memory and a particular battery. So I need to carry a reader for that. My other cameras all use SD cards. If I take my Lumix, it has a different battery. I have two micro 4/3 that I can carry, which use yet another different battery. And of course different batteries mean different chargers. And the eneloops for the flash need a charger. Etc.
We really don’t know how to travel light so it would it be nice to have some standardization. I would probably go into the OM-D line but maybe vary models. Once we get traveling again I’ll probably get the bug and buy at least one.
OK, I’m going back to this excellent post. This is the most impactful and productive answer I can think of ever getting in, lo, two decades on SDMB. So, thanks again for this advice. I have this Fujifilm XT-30 II body now and am having a great time getting to know it and learning how to operate it. And I still appreciate always having the same iPhone you reference always in my pocket. It seems like the best of both worlds.
I ordered a few Fujinon lenses, of which the telephoto macro and the wide angle to telephoto zoom have arrived. Both are MUCH bigger than the camera, and roughly the same size as each other. My early experience is thus for a tiny camera stuck onto the back of a big lens. But today several smaller lenses are due to arrive and I look forward to getting a feel of your second reason: size.
Anyway, I wanted to call this post out as a great answer and thank you for it!
Glad to help! So many times we speak passionately about things we care about here when someone is looking for advice and it seems like not a soul has read the post.
I agree with you on camera size. That’s why I prefer using the 35mm f/2 rather than the 35mm f/1.4 (I have both): the f/2 lens is significantly smaller and gives the camera a nice balance. Putting my portrait prime lenses on does make it feel like the tail is wagging the dog sometimes.
Enjoy your new camera!
And try out those film simulations. As much as I like finessing a photograph on my computer, if I take a few hundred and have a couple dozen keepers, I’d rather not be faffing about trying to get the exact look I want, when the camera has one of the best JPEG renderers in the industry. My faves are Classic Chrome and Acros.
Now I’m working a different angle. Ms Napier and I used to enjoy going on picture taking expeditions, back in the film days. In fact it was one of the most elaborate and adventurous things we would actually do together, and we both really enjoyed it. Two or three weeks ago she fondly reminisced about that, which is one of the reasons I got thinking more seriously. So, I’d like to get her a digital camera too, if she’s agreeable.
Challenge #1 is that she used to use a PC but has moved to the Mac, which I bought her a year or two ago. She hates change and has given up doing anything with photos on the computer because she doesn’t get how “Photos” works. For the uninitiated, it’s the built in photo storing and editing app in the Mac operating system. It syncs with the iPhone in the background, so iPhone pictures automatically appear in the app. And by “in the app” I mean it incorporates a storage system so you don’t see your photos as image files in your filesystem, you see them as icons in “Photos” (though you can export them as image files if you like). It supports “Albums” (like folders), sorting by date or face recognition, and other handy things. It has a decent if basic photo editing toolset. I walked her through it at first and thought she’d like it, but somehow she soured on it (she, uh, sours easy). She says “well, I just don’t do the things I used to like anymore”. So I’ve got to get her through that somehow.
Challenge #2: What camera? I don’t think she’d like changing lenses, and I don’t think she ever wanted to figure shutter speed and aperture. But she does like being able to go wide or long. I’ve been looking at digicams with built in lenses, and it’s pretty amazing. There’s a Kodak PIXPRO Astro Zoom with a 90X optical zoom, which just flat out boggles my mind, and there are fairly similar Panasonic, Canon and Minolta cameras with at least 60X zooms and 20 megapixels, and a Nikon with 40X zoom and 16 megapixels, which is still more than I thought was available in this genre of camera, and all are in the $400 to $600 price range which would be fine.
Does anybody have any thoughts on such cameras?
I’m glad you mentioned this! I have a technical question. Do these simulations do anything in the camera that can’t be done afterwards on a computer?
I mean, for example, you can change the ISO speed of the sensor, which (as I remember reading a few years ago) changes the gain in the A/D converter in the sensor chip itself. There’s nothing you can do after the photo has been taken that completely accomplishes the same thing, because of clipping in highlights and noise in the darkest areas. That makes this camera setting important in a fundamental way. Is there anything about the film simulations that is in this category?
The short answer: Set the camera to “JPEG + RAW” so you have the best of both worlds. You can then always tell the camera to reprocess a shot as “Velvia” instead of “Chrome” if you want to punch up the colors, and when you look at the memory card you will then find multiple files, such as X.raw, X.jpg, X-2.jpg, X-3.jpg.
The JPEG engine in the camera does the standard stuff such as pushing exposure and applying white balance, but the film simulations are in a category of their own. Those simulations have been meticulously crafted by Fujifilm to emulate the color rendition and grain of the various film stocks, and you can’t do it exactly the same way without the camera–they require that X-Processor 4 that your camera has.
They do offer a tethering mechanism where you can use their software to “develop” the photos again from your computer, but what is actually happening is the camera’s processor chip is doing the actual conversions.
That’s interesting. I wonder why they don’t have a standalone RAW processor for their files like other brands do. What does the in camera processor do that a computer can’t?
I have t shot a Fuji since the S2 in 2003/2004 or so and I do have to say their color rendition, especially skin tones, was fantastic.
This page is fun: Fujifilm X-Trans IV Recipes | FUJI X WEEKLY
It has “recipes” for taking pics with your X Trans IV sensor. This one is fun:
You take a double exposure, and the second one is of something white, just to wash out the first one. Instant faded picture look!
Nothing you can’t do in post, especially if you shoot raw, but my days of fiddling with raw (and even photoshop, when I can help it) are over. It’s more fun trying to construct something right in the camera for me.
I agree. I haven’t researched every last possibility, but the fact that their tethering tool requires the camera to be attached to reprocess a photo is a hint that it isn’t supported standalone.
I certainly can understand that they would want only a real X-camera RAW file, for technical reasons, but they ought to be able to do the rest on a computer.
With that said, several years ago I bought an X100T to replace my X100S with one of the specific reasons being that only the newer models had Classic Chrome and Acros, and I really wanted that nice B&W look of Acros with no fuss. In other words, they may be limiting availability of the feature as a marketing strategy.
I wonder if it has something to do maybe with guarding against reverse engineering the processing or something like that? I’m not sure if that makes sense or not, but I’m having difficulty thinking of possible reasons it couldn’t be done in-software.
Does Lightroom try to offer the film emulation in their calibration tab? I know with my Z6II (and other cameras), Adobe give it their best attempt at allowing developing with all the in-camera picture modes on the RAW files. I’m guessing what Fuji does is probably a little more involved in emulating film, but I’m wondering if any options like that show up in their Profile tab.
Update!
I just did a Google of Fujifilm simulations in Lightroom, and it appears that these days Lightroom does allow you to apply these, though you will be limited to the simulations your camera has.
And apparently one can hack that limitation so you have all simulations available to you.
This is new to me. Very cool!
But cooler still to have all of that work done in camera without the need to mess with the RAW files. Glad to know that these days they let you make these changes in LR.
Well, that answers my question. Did I even finish writing it out when you answered? 
Be aware that there are some differences – I know what I get in Capture NX v Adobe does differ a little bit.