Extra Soft With Fujifilm - The 56mm APD

Bokeh is all the rage these days. Apparently it translates to shakiness in the Japanese language and has been taken to mean the appearance of out-of-focus areas in the background of portrait images.

Of course this is an expensive new word hip word - in my day we were satisfied with blurry. In some cases the blurriness extended from the horizon to the front element of the lenses we were using, with no stops in between. Then we invented stops...don't get me started about walking 2 miles to school in the blizzards...

Well, if you are lucky enough to have a Fujifilm camera like the X-E1, X-E2, X-Pro1, or X-T1, you can make use of the lens in the picture. It has good blur to start with and softens the edges of it with a special apodising coating - which means you get a much more attractive portrait with the subject standing out of the background.

Of course you need a large aperture to take advantage of this sort of thing - the Fujifilm 56mm f:1.2 APD has just this and is perhaps the pinnacle of the Fujifilm lens maker's art. Superb finish, solid mount, and very smooth focussing action. It's larger than other Fujifilm X lenses but balances well.