Fujifilm
a 24-70mm f/2.8 G. Early retirement led to expanding my kit with five further prime and zoom lenses, and a range of Lee filters. I also attended more landscape workshops and investigated other genres including street, portraiture and macro. As I already said, kit doesn’t necessarily make you a better photographer, but joining my local camera club, entering competitions and becoming a judge have all helped to improve and expand my picture-making further, and helped enormously on my journey to attain LRPS in June 2018 and my CPAGB in November 2019. It was at my camera club that I was first attracted to Fujifilm’s GFX medium format system as there was an engaging talk given by one of the Fujifilm team. A subsequent visit to the Fujifilm House of Photography in London stoked the interest further. The GFX system also promised to fulfil that childhood dream of shooting with medium format, so I was very
happy to try one out as part of Photography News ' Make the Switch. I opted for the GFX 50R body, a GF32-64mm f/4 R LMWR and a GF23mm f/4 R LMWR, partly because of their similar size and weight to my existing set-up, and partly because I thought the kit would suit my love for landscape photography. I love shooting seascapes in particular, and as the RPS has just added landscape photography to its Associate genres, an upcoming week’s holiday in North Devon seemed like the perfect opportunity to tackle that and the new camera. Along with the lenses I chose, I thought the GFX 50R’s 51.7-megapixel sensor would make it ideal. Unfortunately, storm Ciara had other ideas, and I was not able to put the GFX 50R to the test as much as I
would have liked, due to the gale- force winds, torrential downpours and hailstorms. The camera’s weather sealing may well have kept them at bay, but as any landscape photographer can testify, strong winds and long exposures for moody and creative seascapes don’t generally go together. However, there were a few breaks in the weather, which allowed me to visit a couple of locations I had photographed before, with the idea of directly comparing the image quality between the GFX 50R and shots taken with my existing kit. Due to the poor weather in Devon, I also packed in two all-day sessions in London to further test the GFX’s capabilities across a range of cityscapes, with and without a tripod, and did some street photography,
“By the second session I was very comfortable carrying theGFX50Raroundonawrist strap”
16 Photography News | Issue 76
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