Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Lens
The Fujifilm Fujinon 16-80mm lens is one I’ve wanted for a long time, but it has been surprisingly difficult to get hold of here in Ireland. Ever since it came out, the standalone version has been back-ordered, and it was only really available here as part of a kit. I finally managed to get one second hand a couple of months ago, and I’ve been using it a lot since, including taking it on several trips. So, I wanted to do a non-technical review of this lens for those who might be interested.
If you’ve been following his blog for a while You’ll know that I previously posted about wanting a 24-105 (in full frame terms) equivalent for Fuji for sometime. They previously previewed the 16-80mm lens a while ago and put it in the roadmap, but now they've officially announced the launch date and the full specs of it.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the one lens that I wished Fuji would make, which was a 16-70f/4. Well, today, Fuji announced their new lens roadmap, and on it is a new entry - a 16-80f/4 - which is even better than what I had hoped for!
While Fuji no doubt has a great range of lenses, and it certainly has some high-quality Primes, there are a couple of holes in its lineup still, in my opinion. There is one lens, that is very popular on some other systems, and it’s the lens I miss the most from when I had it for my Canon 5d. For me, it’s the ideal walk around focal length, and that is a 24-105mm equivalent. For a Fuji X-series system, that would be a 16-70mm.
Continuing on from my post the other day, I’ve done some more shooting with my borrowed Sony A7II using some of my Canon lenses. This time, I was back out in the city of Dublin. I wanted to do something a little different, and so I used my 17-40f4L Canon lens to get some cityscape shots.
As I only have a limited set of lenses for my X-Pro 2 at the moment, so I have been keen to try some of my other glass on the camera via adaptors. The X-Pro 2 has some nice focusing aids, and I have some interesting lenses, so I wanted to see what kind of results I could get. Lens adaptors can actually be quite expensive, depending on the brand, but there are cheaper options available. As this was more of an experiment than anything, I went with some of the cheaper adaptors that available.
It never ceases to amaze me the difference a good lens can make to your image quality. I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but until you've used some high end glass, you don't really know just how much of a difference it can make. There's a lot of misinformation out there on the internet (shocker) when it comes to what makes a good lens, or even the importance of good quality optics to begin with. One well known and somewhat infamous blogger, has even stated that the lens actually makes no difference in terms of image quality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When I wrote my extended review of the A6000, I was pretty scathing about the Sony 35mm f/ 1.8 OSS lens. In the article I wrote that it was one of my least favourite lenses and that it had some terrible chromatic aberration. Recently, I was going through some older images in y library, including some I’d shot with the Sony 35mm and as I went through them I realised that I may have been a bit hard on it. So I started shooting some more images with it, and I now realise that I was possibly wrong in my assessment of it, so here’s a second look at the 35mm lens.
When I was writing my epic three part Sony A6000 review, for whatever reason I left out any mention of the two best lenses that I have for the system. They are the Sigma 30mm and 19mm e-mount lenses. I’m not really sure how I managed to forget about these when I was writing the piece, but anyway, I’m making up for it now by writing this mini-review of the two lenses.
One of the biggest complaints that users of Sony’s Aps-c format E-mount cameras such as the A6000 have is the lack of good, inexpensive prime lenses. In my recent long term review of the A6000 I made this point, and I wished for an equivalent to Fuji’s excellent 35mm f/1.4. In fact, the lack of a good fast native prime for the format has been a real issue. Fortunately Sigma has just addressed that gap in the lineup with the launch of the new 30mm f/1.4mm prime lens for e-mount (and m43).
Sigma today announced a very interesting new product. The inspiringly named MC-11 is a lens mount adaptor designed specifically to adapt Sigma's lenses for use on Sony e-mount systems. It comes in either canon EF or Sigma SA versions for use with corresponding sigma lenses.
I’ve previously tried using Nikon lenses with my Sony A6000 and I’ve been mostly pleased with the results. There were a few minor issues though. For one, the focus rings on the Nikon lenses that I own are really bad. There’s a significant lag between when you turn the ring and when it catches the mechanism underneath. This makes manually focussing a tad tricky. Secondly, you have to control the aperture with a ring on the adaptor which has no stops, so it makes setting a specific aperture quite difficult. Using the Metabones adaptor with my Canon lenses was a much better experience.
When I was shooting a lot with my Sony NEX–7, before it died on me, I would occasionally use Nikon lenses on it, with a Novaflex adaptor. I really liked the results, but I didn’t do it that often, because personally, I found that the process of manual focussing was a little to awkward for my style of shooting. Even with the great focus peaking feature (which isn’t always accurate unfortunately), it just wasn’t worth it for the amount of times I wanted to do it. With my newer A6000, I had put off trying to shoot with Nikon lenses because of this, but I recently took the opportunity to try it out, and boy, what a difference.
