Peter Figen
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
|
AZSteve wrote:
The GF 500mm is very similar in dimensions, weight, number of elements exotic and otherwise, and price to the new Sigma 500mm f/5.6, recently very favorably reviewed by LensTip. There's no reason why lenses with such specs shouldn't be pretty nearly diffraction limited in the center and not much worse in the corners. You might say the Fuji design is a bit more daring, in that it has only two large elements up front. Optically it's pretty sure to be as good as it needs to be.
Possibly the main reason this lens hasn't attracted much attention is that most of the market for super-telephotos is for birds and other wildlife, and deep-pocketed enthusiasts are committed to systems with several long lenses, many of them faster than f/5.6. For Peter and Bobby and me this GF 500mm is sort of a luxury novelty landscape lens, no? I still have a full Sony system with a pair of A7RM5's and a bunch of lenses I'd hate to part with, including the 200-600mm G, which did a pretty good job with the eclipse in Oklahoma, and which as a landscape lens has the very substantial advantage of being a zoom. The Sony won't test quite as well as the Fuji almost certainly, but given typical landscape atmospheric seeing conditions, will there be much practical difference? And even Lloyd Chambers with a Mercedes van to deploy is muttering about how hard it is to carry everything. I have to fit my stuff into a 4Runner and schlepp it to the hotel room every night for security reasons. TOO MUCH GEAR!
All that said, I'm on the verge of preordering the $#%$$^&^%&* thing....Show more →
I've already put my name on one at Samy's. Can't wait. I'm pretty fine with having one SKB case with the 250, 500 and 1.4 giving me four great lenses in one case. I'm going to keep the Canon 500 at least for the time being.
It's also interesting that after another couple of months of shooting downtown L.A. from six or seven miles away this winter, and encountering thermal interference to one degree or another almost all the time, shooting with longer lenses, and specifically, shooting vertical shots with the 500mm on the GFX and stitching them together, even with the interference, resulted in far greater real detail in the final image, and to be honest, you really can't see it until you get into really huge prints - like over ninety inches in width on those panos I've been doing.
And then there were days where it just looked like you were shooting through a shower door and nothing was usable, but generally, the closer it was to dusk, the clearer it was, and using two tripods also made a huge and very visible difference as well. Lastly, in those long distance cityscapes, the manual shutter was far better as often the shimmering from the thermals combined with the electronic shutter caused the verticals in the buildings to turn into long lazy vertical S's. Very frustrating until I figured it out.
|
