robvisual - photography

I recently drove to Fehmarn an island in north Germany at the baltic sea to take some photos and enjoy nature together with a friend. I took my new 100-200m with me. I've ended up with a square photo challenge (the 50r is perfect for this kind of photos). The lens worked like designed. It is still a heavy bulky lens but on the other side there is no tube sticking out of the design and it is weather resistant. For me it is the perfect zoom like my XF 100-200mm I owned before. The OIS works flawless and bear in mind that even on larger sensor it is still a 200mm telephoto lens. You just get a wider portion of the image. In the near future I will invest some money into the teleconverter to get some extra focal length for more compression.

  I did it. After selling my whole Fuji rig last year in trade for a GFX50r combined with the 62mm 2.8 it was followed by the 50mm 3.5 and now the 100-200mm 5.6. Without a telephoto lens something is missing for me. Sometimes you need the compression and the depth of field provided by such a lens for portraits, architecture, landscapes and for things far away. In future I also want to buy the teleconverter to beef up the focal length a bit more. There are so many scenes that cry for a telephoto lens. Believe me! :-) My first impression was like expected for a Fuji lens in that price range, the resulting images are sharp with lots of detail without any compromise in color rendition. The bokeh is pleasing and the lens just does the job. There is no tube sticking out of the lens body wich makes the whole thing a bit heavy (but weather sealed) and bulky, but the quality of the results are worth the cramps and muscle pain. This is the hard work that photography was always about with hea...

 I've updated my portfolio page after going with the outdated koken (discontinued) for the last years. I tried to avoid services like squarespace because their aggressive marketing in the photographic world is a bit too much for my taste and I want a simple page without too much features. I tried the Adobe Portfolio service that comes free within my lightroom subscription. You can map your domain to the finished page and it works like a classic CMS with focus on photographers. You can also set all important switches for Favicon, Google Analytics etc. The included themes are distraction free and classic. You can import your Lightroom cloud albums with an ease. Only the update of those albums is a bit complicated because you have to trigger it via Lightroom online. BTW: I am not paid by Adobe. They just made it easy and simple to setup a decent portfolio page within a short time that cam be updated from LR. Well done!

Just wait for it and don't do a thing. Just let it happen and watch the financial crisis slowly unfold itself. But don't come crying when it hits you hard and there is no option left than following the billionaires. Sapere aude!  

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and the camera might work for you. This is not a Fuji is better than everything post :-) I've tried to love the Ricoh and have a little list with pros and cons: The good Size - If you need an APS-C sensor pocket camera, this is the one! The lens is superb and walks back into the body making it a super duper small camera! Image quality - the files have a great range and a neutral color reproduction. Nothing to complain. Craftmanship - the camera body is sturdy. Even the moving lens works flawless. The bad Menu - the menu system is not as easy as I know it from my Fuji gear. There are some nice ideas like the custom settings that can be tied to the mode-wheel, but overall I was not satisfied. Shutter button - a soft mess for me. It failed for me when it comes to a half press lock many times. It doesn't feel right for me. Display - in bright sunlight you are lost. I've also missed the possibility to review a photo through the EVF in brig...

     

 

How about going back in time and re-issue the good old Ricoh 500 GX? I bought this camera six years ago and love it. Pure rangefinder fun with an awesome lens. A digital model would be a great idea. Just integrate the electronic parts of the GR III into this body and I will buy it :-) Here are some example photos taken with the above mentioned camera:

Yes, it's a Ricoh GR III and not another Fuji camera. Why? After buying the GFX 50R I needed a small and lightweight camera that travels with me all the time. After a longer research I found a used Ricoh GR III with the optical viewfinder in a well known camera store in Hamburg and decided to give it a trial period. When your are coming from a Fuji camera you need some time to get into the menu system and the design philosophy of this brand. After setting it up for the streets I started to make my first experiences with this new tool. Note: this article is not about the image quality or pixel peeping. There are tons of blogs doing this kind of stuff very good. For me it is the ease of use and the handiness that counts. It will post some images here in the future and tell you my opinion about this camera. Some images I took with it recently:

After using this camera for about four weeks I almost get used to the new format. What are the differences compared to a full frame or aps-c camera? The main difference for me is a physical due to the change in sensor size. You have to stop down to higher aperture values to get everything in focus. This leads to higher ISO values to get a decent shutter speed. So if you're coming from the aps-c world, you need to update your shooting routine. Despite this change it opens up a whole new world in working with a shallower depth of field when it comes to portraits etc. This means taking environmental portraits with the 63mm lens at a distance (full body portrait) that has that pop out factor. The quality of the resulting images blew me away. And just to mention it again. The quality of the glass is outstanding. Too less photo fanatics out there are talking about the GF lenses. For your money you get tack sharp lenses (even sharp wide open) that are all weather sealed. Fuji is produ...

The GF50 3.5 is on sale now. Fuji just cut the price in half, making this buy a steal. I bought the lens at my local dealer and had the time take some photos with it. After taking the glass out of the box I noticed how light and small it is in terms of medium format. The build quality is like the 63mm. After screwing it on my GFX50R the lens was ready to shoot. The first thing I noticed is a constant light buzzing noise coming from the lens when the camera is on shooting mode. I've asked Olaf Stzaba who owns the same lens and his lens is behaving the same. The 63mm is totally quiet. I guess it has to do with the linear motor drive inside. With an maximum aperture of 3.5 it this lens can't be considered as a fast lens. For normal street photography at daylight it is fast enough. The image quality is flawless and there are no visible distortions and vignetting (autom. corrected in software anyway). For around 500 bucks this lens is a real bargain. Go and get it. I...

Yesterday I've decided to take my new medium format tool with me and take some photos after work in Hamburg city. In winter times it gets too dark too fast, the perfect setup to test the low light qualities of the camera. The shot on the right was the result of a quick and dirty one second exposure at ISO 100 using a handrail on a bridge as a tripod. The level of detail is stunning and I am curious to reach deeper into the world of many pixels to squeeze out more details. I also discovered that some handheld images can catch a like shake if you can't hold the camera still enough, but the pixel density helps you out when it comes to cropping the whole image down to a smaller format. The resulting image still look tack sharp. The 63mm 2.8 performs well in low light situations. It would be even better if Fuji would have integrated OIS, but even without this technology you can get great results. My plan  is to get some faster lenses in future. There is an adapter for cano...

I've started with the Fuji X100 in 2012 and this was the begin of a long love story with the Fuji brand. After using bulky Nikon cameras for a long time (don't get me wrong, they were great) I had enough and needed a change. I found out that I am more of a street shooter who needs smaller gear that travels with me and the X-series came at the right time to start over with a new smaller mirrorless form factor. And now after more than six years of using Fuji cameras I sold my X100F, X-PRO2 and five lenses to trade them for a GFX50R and the GF 63mm 2.8 via a great camera store in Hamburg that is specialized in selling new and used gear. I was in the lucky position to get an almost unused GFX50R with lens coming back from a professional photo studio because they stepped up to a GFX100. But why did I sold my whole gear for a medium format camera? After being satisfied with my X-PRO2 I decided to challenge myself with a new experience. Medium format is different in terms of p...

Long story short: Here are five of my favorite street photographers directly from my bookmark collection: Christopher Reuter - www.christopher-reuter.com Ed Amsterdam -  www.instagram.com/edamsterdam Jürgen Bürgin -  www.juergenbuergin.com Jaime Bird -  www.instagram.com/jaime.bird Marco Täuber - www.marctaeuber.com Share what you like... Cheers, Nils

There is very little information about this new software, but the main purpose is to use the specialized image processor of the camera to process you images via a USB connection in-camera. The resulting images have that superb Fuji quality. So the software is more of a remote control for something you can still do today. Maybe it has more options and you have the bigger (calibrated) screen of your desktop or notebook to operate with. But what is it good for? I think this will be a great solution for photographers who are on the go. Imagine using a light notebook together with your camera to process some images you took as a travel photographer. Just go back to your hotel room and work on the final images without compromising image quality. I don't know if I want to connect my camera for hours to process more than ten images, so I'am curious about the concept and the use cases Fuji will present to us in the near future. What do you think about this new software solution...

I am back from a nice little trip to Palma de Mallorca. Many people associate Mallorca with cheap travel and lots of even cheaper alcohol. And yes, there is a dirty side of Palma that had a big influence on my latest photography, because there is a lot of waste, pollution and ugly architecture in and around the main city of this beautiful island. As a street and documentary photographer there is nothing ugly in the first place. Through the right angle and at the right time things look different (in a different light as we say). The next photos are the pure essence of what I saw in Palma. Find the rest of the images on my Homepage . Enjoy...