The Fujifilm Flash Comes Of Age

If you are opposed to the use of electronic flash in any form for your photography - for artistic, technical, or cultural reasons, this will be a thin week.

If you are dedicated to a camera system other than Fujifilm, you might also wonder whether you are going to get much on your plate. Have faith - there are a number of good lessons here for you as well that you can apply to the equipment of your choice. The close approximation of some flash systems will let you benefit.

We showed the externals of the Fujifilm EF-X500 flash on the 6th of January this year - the column got a large number of readers. I've added a couple of the images to help illustrate this series but this week is dedicated to what the thing actually does - and did - in my studio.

A quick basic recap for those who don't want to plough through the Jan 6 post: the flash is a classic TTL hot-shoe electonic flash with more power than the previous Fujifilm offerings. It contains provision for commander and slave operation, manual working, and multiple-flash ( high speed ) applications. It has a video light built into it. It is dedicated to the Fujifilm X-series of cameras. And up until this week I had only ever fired it once in the X-system.

Okay. First test was to open the battery compartment and put in four AA cells. Don't laugh - some manufacturers make the battery door so thin and cheap that you hesitate to get your nail in there to prise it open. No such problem with Fujifilm, and they have had the good sense to make the stacking order in the compartment simple - batteries down in the front two wells - batteries up in the back. It means you can change the blessed things in the dark without having to see some little diagram. As well, the design of the casing means the whole flash will lay on it's left side on a flat surface to do this - no juggling act.

Clip it onto the X-camera.? Now we have a metal shoe to do it with and a lever lock for the front pin. Much better than the plastic shoe and wheel of the EF-42.

Can you hold the flash from the front as you use it without impeding the function? Yes, but be aware that there is an LED panel at the top and the communication port for the wireless control down the bottom.

Is the tilt a locking mechanism? Yes. The rubber button pressed in lets it go freely. It locks into horizontal and vertical. The swivel has a firm detent.

Is this a power port? Yes, it is, and apparently they are going to produce an external battery pack to aid the flash. Wedding and event shooters may rejoice. Until it arrives, we are going to use AA lithium cells.

Setup. Well you can specify a great many things that suggest alternative uses for the flash. It will power off in one hour if you want, or you can power off in 8 hours. I think this accommodates the people who are going to be shooting time-lapse sequences. It will sit there as a remote flash for 10 minutes before giving up or you can ask it to stay alert for 60 minutes. It is all a matter of using up battery power. Try asking ME to stay alert for 60 minutes at a wedding...

The actual menus that apportion the flashes when you are in TTL mode can be sent out to 3 groups - normally this is a daunting set of commands to order up from an LCD screen. In this case Fujifilm have made it " almost " intuitive . I think they have benefited by waiting and watching other Japanese makers invent the language of menus. It only foxed me once with a strange use of English.

The weight of the flash is about 120 grammes more than the previous EF-42. As a trade-off, you get a much improved feel of build quality.

The front bezel around the flash tube is held on with two metal detents. Takes a bit of a struggle to get it off, but once done, you can slip on a box diffuser. It does as much as these designs ever do, and if you slip it forward from the detents, you can get a useful spread of light. Still not as broad as a Mag Mod, so you may still want to add this to the setup.

 Tomorrow - first studio shoot. Have I bought the right thing?*

* Yup. I sometimes spend my own money on the things I review. Once you find a good thing - stick to it.

The X100 Cameras Go Out For The Day...

And the evening, too. Not everything happens in a studio, so you have to go out to where they store the landscapes. You might be able to make convincing copies on a tabletop or in Photoshop, but if you use the original scenes it is a lot cheaper and quicker.

Jandakot, again, and boiling hot. It can't be too much fun to do circuits and bumps in the heat and I daresay there is quite a lot of turbulence coming up off the tarmac. Nevertheless, I balanced one X 100 in one hand and one X100F in the other and tried to track the same planes in the same phase of takeoff.

The settings are as before - ProNeg Hi for the X100F and Provia for the X100. See the difference that it makes with the grass colour? As before the X100F is on Large/Fine JPEG and the X 100 is running RAW.

The picture sizes are adjusted in the final result to show the resolution. The tail registration numbers on the aircraft prove that the X100F JPEG is better than the X100 RAW...but by just a little bit.

Note as well in the uncropped versions that the vignetting the X100 is prone to is easily seen against the mid-blue sky. Not there in the X100F file. As an effect in portraiture or reportage - very helpful. In landscapes, not so much.

Later in the day the good old South Perth foreshore at dusk delivered the goods. It also delivered the ants - watch yourselves when you set up for landscape shots - some of the landscape regards you as food.

The fact that the X100F could be run at much higher ISO before electronic noise crept in - a function of the newer processor in the camera - meant that the motion of the water was easier to stop. In the case of these shots I relented and shifted both cameras to Velvia and both AE systems to Average.

I reviewed the images and found a number of them unusable:

a. The panorama pictures that you can do at 120º or 180º looked fine on the back of the LCD but as they were taken at a slow shutter speed and too high a rotation rate, there was a lot of motion blur. The cure would have been to set the shutter speed to 1/60 to 1/180 of a second and raise the ISO accordingly.

b. Some of the still shots had a surprising amount of blur. This is my fault for trusting a lightweight tripod and no cable release - even the pressure of me jabbing down on the camera was enough to displace it slightly. The studio Gitzo Studex 5 on a concrete floor is one thing - a spindly tripod on grass is another. Lesson learned for next time.

 

Note the thunderhead seen earlier in the day down the length of our street. I took it as much to test the dynamic range of the camera, as to admire the beauty of nature. The lightning show was great at South Perth as well, though no-one did as well with the lightning pictures as our friend Duncan Dodd. He may have arranged for the thunderstorm just to get some good pictures down at Rockingham.

100 + 100 + 100 + 100 = F...A Fuji Week With A Difference

This weblog column may be a little hard to write as I am chortling and it affects my ability to type.
The reason for the glee is that I have my hands on a bran-new fresh sample of the Fujifilm X-100F camera and two days in which to wring it out. I am like a P - Plater with his first Bugatti Veyron.

Okay, I have to hand it back but I am going to find out if it is a worthy successor to the Fujifilm X-100 camera I already own. This isn't just idle gear-fiddling - if it is a substantial improvement it is going to cost me money later down the track. If I drop it in the mud it is going to cost me right now...

Okay, the physicalities first - Let's turn the camera right around.:

It is very much the shape of the X100, but with the difference that there is a smidgen more depth to the body - It is accommodating an NP-W126S battery rather than the old NP-95 of the X100. You get a wider grip at the right hand side. Here's the batteries - the NP-W126s has the orange dot.

There are subtle body changes everywhere but the sum of them is to make you think you are handling the predecessors - they have been careful with that. You also get the same lens that you had before, but it is matched to a new sensor and processor and now delivers 24 mega pixels vs the 16 of the X100S and X 100T. My X-100 runs at half that number, so there is a big difference right away.

The LCD screen at the back is larger - and has led to an emphasis upon the RHS for the controls.

Now details:

You get an external microphone port in the cable locker of the new X100F - the old X100 compels you to fire the shutter with a mechanical release. Electric ones are easier.

The scroll wheel around the multi-control button is long gone, and the buttons have a better feel. The real advance is the joystick at the top of the button tree - it lets you steer the AF points about the screen or viewfinder with great ease. An advantage over the previous cameras. The rear thumb wheel has replaced the jog button. It can be used to do a variety of tasks.

The LHS panel with the focus selector is VASTLY improved. Note how you now slide from Manual focus to Single auto-focus at the two limits of the switch...rather than fumbling in the dark trying to find a centre position detent. The continuous auto-focus is less used and it deserves the central spot.

There's the cleaned-up LHS at the back. All the buttons shifted right and the screen grown out to fill the space. The wishers who wanted Fujifilm to articulate the screen in this design were disappointed, but I think that the smoothness of the back and the fact that there is nothing to a catch and break makes up for it. You get a bit more eye-clearance looking into the viewfinder if you are wearing spectacles.

Tune in tomorrow when we move round the front of the camera and see what new bits have been added.

Leica's New C Compact Camera in action at Steve Huff

Steve Huff is a photographer who writes from the US about many different aspects of the art. He gets a chance to play with a number of dead serious top-quality cameras and lenses...and sometimes gets to play with the luxurious fun stuff as well.

Recently he got to go out with the Leica C camera and he's written a candid and kindly review of it on his Blog site. If you'd like to see what he said about it, please click on the link below, but don't forget if you love the review and wish to purchase one, buy from us please, we have them on special for $699 AUD inc GST in both colours.

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/tag/leica-c/

Steve is a respected reviewer, who also shoots a lot personally, and we're happy to share his post.

He displays some of the images he made with the camera - they are happy pictures taken of family on a trip - the very sort of work that this Leica is suited to. He mentions that he tended to use the LCD rather than the EVF but that is his preference. The great thing about this design is that you get the choice.

Steve is not shy about comparing the camera to a similar design from Panasonic, but he is clear about the advantages and the cachet associated with the Leica name and logo. One thing that people who buy it can be assured of -The name of Leica is always associated with quality, and Camera Electronic backs up that quality with service.