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that caters for most requirements. As a travel photographer who enjoys shooting a wide range of genres, these lenses have generally served me well. Over the past year or two I’ve noticed more talk around mirrorless cameras and their growing popularity among photographers. The write- ups on the evolving technology and developments in this space have fascinated me. So, one day, while sitting in my local camera club reading a copy of Photography News , the opportunity to try out Fujifilm’s mirrorless cameras presented itself, and I couldn’t resist. I was thrilled when I received news that I had been selected and immediately began preparing. Based in London and only a quick drive from the Kent countryside, I planned for my shoots to include landscape and urban scenes to get a feel of howwell this camera is geared towards travel photography. I had read in a recent article that Fujifilm’s X-T3 camera was rated one of the top five mirrorless cameras in 2019 so for me it was an easy decision as to which camera I would pick. It has a cropped sensor and, while my current camera is full-frame, I did own a Canon EOS 7D before moving to my current set-up, so cropped-frame wasn’t going to be unfamiliar territory for me. To go with the X-T3, I picked the FujifilmXF16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR lens and XF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 R LMOISWR lens. The 16-55mmmakes for a perfect walk-around lens with the given focal range and it is a fast lens – ideal for those late afternoon low-light conditions when shooting after work. The XF100-400mm is a beast; it’s never easy shooting on the far end of this range and I wanted to see how the mirrorless camera was going to hold up. Onmy very first outing, I stopped not too far fromwhere I had set off to check that I had definitely packed the 400mm lens. The difference in weight tomy standard kit is certainly noticeable, so that’s a bonus for those of us who like to travel light. The first thing that struckme was the layout of buttons on the X-T3. Different from that of my current camera, with a large left dial controlling ISO and right dial controlling shutter speed. It tookme a while to find the control for aperture setting, and that’s because it’s not where you would expect it to be. Cleverly located on the lens itself, the aperture is controlled in the same way that focal range is; a simple twist left for wide aperture and vice versa. This meant that after very little time using the camera, I could adjust ISO, shutter speed and aperture using the three large controls without having to take my eye off the viewfinder. I always shoot inmanual mode so I found this to be a huge plus – valuable in those quick-snapping street scenes. The electronic viewfinder is certainly a unique experience, very different to that of standard DSLRs but this, together with the flip screen, makes for perfect composition and exposure. While I did notice an occasional lag with the viewfinder in low-light conditions, the real-time picture view reflecting that of what the image will look like is
28 Photography News | Issue 71
photographynews.co.uk
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