Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Going Old Skool, kinda

It has been a while since I posted last on this blog. Having been busy giving classes and clinics, which do in fact take some time to prepare, I was running short on time.

In the course of this blog, you have seen me liking Fuji cameras, e.g. the X100S, but also slowly getting the hang of mirror-less systems. A few weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and bought a Fuji X-Pro1 'special edition' kit with 2 lenses and a camera case. I figure, the 'special' offer just intends to sell the stock off, so that the X-Pro2, which is announced for fall 2015, wont have a competitor.
Personally, I hesitated, the EVF of the X-Pro1 is considered being not really good, however, the hybrid-viewfinder, which I love so much on the X100S, is brilliant!
One thing speaks for the X-Pro1: the possibility to adapt lenses of various kinds to the camera. This fact finally bought me into the system.

Adapters
Before even thinking of adapting lenses, one need to obtain adapters... In my case, those where 2 different ones:
  1. M42 - FX
  2. EF - FX
The first option is somewhat obvious. You may know that I own a decent amount of good M42 glass, e.g.:
  • 55mm f/1.4 Cosinon
  • 85mm f/2 Jupiter-9
  • 135mm f/2.8 Pentacon
With the 1.5 crop factor the the APS-C sensor, the Jupiter-9 and the Cosinon make brilliant portrait lenses.

Now you may ask, why EOS EF lenses? Most of the EF lenses are 'by wire', hence, a cheap passive adapter would not be any good. And, I cannot agree more with your doubts. However, I actually own some more wacky lenses for the Canon system, i.e.:
  • LensBabies' system
  • Samyang 24mm T-S lens
all of which are entirely manually controlled lenses.
So, while the M42 adapter takes care of all my prime lenses, the EF adapter enables me to use my creative lenses on the Fuji camera system.