Friday, April 4, 2014

Beauty photo session with the Fuji 56mm lens

Today I was able to give the Fuji 56mm f/1.2 lens a good workout on a beauty shooting in the studio with Ariel, one of my favorite models. My X-T1 is in the shop having its light leak repaired so I attached the lens to an X-E2 for the session. The sample images below pretty much sum up why I love working with high quality fast aperture lenses in available light. I wanted to keep things bright and airy, and working towards the most open aperture settings with a lot of selective focus helped. Normally, I do shootings like this with a Nikon D4, but lately I'm finding myself getting very comfortable, and not sacrificing any quality, by moving to the Fuji X system.

The lens is absolutely sensational, the camera, too, but with a model like Ariel it's really pretty hard to miss.

You can check out the full specs on the Fuji 56mm f/1.2 lens on the B&H Photo website, where it can also be ordered. You can also read my full hands-on review of the lens here.

The latest RAW release candidate for Photoshop is necessary for reading RAW files from the X-T1 and X-E2, but there is also another side benefit from this version of RAW. It includes a new set of Camera Profiles for the Fuji X-cameras.

This is the new drop-down menu of the Photshop ACR camera profile options for the Fuji-X series RAW files. My favorite for people photography, and the one I used for most of the images below, is the Camera Pro Neg. Hi. For landscape and travel I like the Velvia/VIVID or PROVIA/STANDARD. You really need to try them all to see which one best suits the image type you are processing. One thing is for certain, these profiles have saved me a lot of time in post processing. 








If you are planning on purchasing the Fuji 56mm lens, you can help support this site at no extra cost to you by purchasing from one of our affiliate sellers listed below -- and thanks for your support.

The Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2 R Lens can be ordered from:  BH-Photo 

5 comments :

  1. Tom, Every time I see your images shot with a Fuji I think about moving to the X system and away from Nikon. Your images are really good. Then I see a lot of others and I’m not that impressed with the color out of the camera or especially the BW files. I recently purchased an X100S to see if I can get a handle on processing Fuji files. Yours is the standard to where I’m trying to get. I know it's the photographer not the gear but I wanted to say thanks for sharing these beautiful images and show how good that sensor can be.

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    1. Thanks for the kind words, Brian. As a result of your comment on color, I added an extra section to the above post that discusses the new Fujifilm Camera RAW profiles that come in the latest Photoshop RAW release candidate. This accounts for some of the coloring in these images.

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  2. Like Brian I'm super impressed with your color; unlike Brian I own a xt1 and xe2 and am having a bit of a problem getting quality equal to my canons. A lot of my work is available light which I try to balance using a neutral area in the shot, or playing with the available light balances in the photoshop raw converter. But your pictures just SING -- do you balance to a special card or source or color checker, or what? Thanks!

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  3. Thanks, Don. I always shoot RAW and I always include a color correction card in every scene I photograph. Since I do a lot of available light, that also means including it again any time the light seems to shift a bit as when the sun might go behind a cloud. The card makes it quite simple to start the color correction process in Photoshop ACR by simply clicking on it with the white balance tool. I use two types of cards: the QP Card QP101, or the WhiBal G7 which is more durable and comes in several convenient sizes. There is even a small on made for a keychain. I keep it on my key chain so I am never without it.

    This doesn't mean I always go with the corrected white balance, but it does let me know what the corrected calculation is so I can use it as a reference and alter color from there.

    Sounds like white balance might be a good topic for a blog post. Let me see if I can work one up. - t

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