Photography by Mike Mander | First Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4R Tests

First Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4R Tests

November 16th

Apart from some boring lens tests, these are the first images I've shot with the new Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4R wide angle lens. The first three shots were taken handheld at the Olympic Village. Photos 4 through 18 were taken at UBC, all with a tripod and several augmented with some light painting. Photos 19 through 23 were at Granville Island, 24 at a friend's house and the last one is a photo of my father. The last two shots were also handheld.

For those interested, the photos that had a little bit of flashlight light painting were 8 (top roofline and trees on left), 12 (all three monuments and trees above the bell monument), 13 (red leaves on ground and pagoda), 14 (left side of statue), 16 (clock tower structure) and 17 (foreground light pole). The racoon shot was taken with the X-E1's onboard flash, the resulting photo heavily vignetted in Lightroom to avoid peripheral distraction of the bright concrete, thus making it almost look spotlit.

The first three images and the racoons (10) were only processed in Adobe Lightroom. The rest of the images were processed first in PhotoNinja, then the resulting TIFF file had some followup processing in Lightroom before being exported for the gallery. Note that PhotoNinja does not yet have very effective highlight recovery for Fujifilm X-Trans raw files, a known issue, so the dynamic range of numerous shots is less that it would be if the raw files had only been processed through Lightroom. However, PhotoNinja does a much better job of maintaining texture and sharpness of the darker areas of a raw file, which is the reason I am using it. None of the photos had any barrel distortion correction or chromatic aberration correction applied since the new 23mm lens is very nearly perfectly corrected optically. Some photos did have slight perspective corrections applied in Lightroom. Larger than usual (for my galleries), 3000 pixel wide images are available so you can better tell the capabilities of this excellent new lens.