It’s all right there in the title.
My Very First Attempt at Light Painting
My Most Recent, Best Image
This is my favorite photo produced from an all-day shoot with Kelsey a few weeks ago. I’ll write a more comprehensive post on the day soon.
GF 80mm ƒ/1.7R WR, Continued
Gonna make this quick... I finally had a chance to take the Fujifilm GF 80mm ƒ/1.7R WR lens for GFX out on a photowalk to peer thru it from an urban landscape and street photography perspective. Let's say I'm a little more than impressed.
There's something about this lens that gives everything a 3 dimensional quality. The subject just pops right off the page. Sure, that's what large bore portrait lenses do but there's something special about this lens, a quality my GF 110mm ƒ/2 lacks. Even compared to the Sigma Art 85mm ƒ/1.4 I previously owned and adapted onto the GFX 50S, the GF 80mm exceeds it in lifting the subject out of the frame.
Update: Preparing to Test a Digital Instant Medium Format Film Camera System
So here we are. As promised at the end my GF 80mm ƒ/1.7 lens review, I've received the Fujifilm Instax Share SP-3 printer and 8 film packs totaling 80 exposures.
I've never owned or printed using Instax so I decided to use one pack of film to print a full spectrum of recent shots; a couple of portraits with 2 printed directly from the camera, monochrome, vivid color, high contrast, golden hour and my personal processing style. I wanted to get a good feel for the film's dynamic range, color, contrast and sharpness. While the film is traditional instant pack film, the printer works by projecting the image on an 800 x 800 dot, micro-OLED display that exposes the film, basically a digital form of the optical projection used to expose pack film in a traditional Polaroid Land camera. Because it's not fully optical and the micro-OLED is so, uh, micro, I wanted to see how far I could stretch it so I can make adjustments to my shooting style for the best results.
Adapting FX?
You may have heard that Fujifilm has opened the door slightly to third-parties regarding their APS-C based X-mount. It seems they've finally given in to both unrelenting pressure from their users and the reality of being able to fully flesh out their lens lineup with more niche lenses in a timely and profitable way. One example: poor sales of the $5995 XF 200mm ƒ/2 with 1.4x Teleconverter, a specialty prime designed for sports and wildlife photographers. It seems very few people "clamoring" for that sort of lens actually put their money where their mouths are and has made Fujifilm gun shy about serving up more high performance, expensive, niche lenses. However, the result is Fujifilm opening up X-mount to approved third parties...
A Few Updates Coming…
Some hardware and software updates are coming soon in the near future. For software, I think I'm going to add a Smugmug account to my blog to make it far easier to sell prints online. Currently, I use Flickr to house the images for preview and depend on customers emailing me a request. That's a lot of friction. However, my only issue with Smugmug is their dependence on 3 printers whose quality is questionable and their products are mostly gimmicky crap. Since my gallery is quite small, as I'm extremely critical about the photos I'll include for sale, plus my desire to keep my print runs extremely limited (no more than 25 sold per image), I prefer to have full control of who and how does my printing, matting and framing.
JetCity Ninja 
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