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gdanmitchell wrote:
Speaking as a person who shot manual focus-only lenses and cameras for decades and as a person who prefers to manually focus when shooting landscapes and similar (mostly) static subjects, I have a hard time understanding the appeal of only being able to manually focus this particular kind of lens.
For me, this sort of lens — a compact, pancake style, wide angle lens — seems most appropriate for things like street photography and similar. That's how I used the Fujifilm 27mm f/2.8 WR (and how I used the earlier version) on my XPro2 and now my XT5. It is — for me at least — mostly a system for when I want to work fast and light and remain unobtrusive.
Back in the day we did manage to shoot street with manual focus lenses. However, back then the standards for image quality were generally (and by necessity) much lower, so the old "f8 and be there" hyperlocal approach worked OK. If things happened quickly, as they tend to do in the street, we got good enough IQ at f/8 with slightly inaccurate focus that let us make 8" x 10" or maybe 11" x 14" prints of decent quality — though today most folks using digital gear would not be happy with those results.
But with AF I can work more quickly when necessary. The camera/lens can AF faster and more accurately than I can using either the muscle memory or close-enough-is-good-enough and/or hyperlocal approaches to manual focusing. Sometimes AF does fail in the clutch, but that's street photography.
And, of course, I can still manually focus my AF lenses in the (rare) situations in which that might produce a better result. (More likely, I might AF the spot where I expect my subject to be, then turn AF off temporarily while keeping that AF-determined focus point.)
Now, IF there was a 27mm f/2 AF lens with the quality we expect from the Fujiflm lens and the small size of this lens, I'd be interested.
YMMV....Show more →
Personally, a great part of it is that I’m still not satisfied with the current 27mm lens options out there.
I also already have lots of other small, fast AF lenses to use on the street when I don’t want to worry with manual focus (not exactly pancake, but that’s irrelevant for me as long as they’re small and light).
The fact that this Voigtlander is a pancake is not the major appeal for me, what I want is a 40mm equivalent lens with good optical quality and at least f/2, and so far this is the most promising one.
Being MF will also make it special to use, I like to have this sort of variety. Sometimes working with limitations is appealing creatively, recently I even got a old Olympus E300 with a kit lens, it’s a interesting challenge to use a slow clunky camera with a noisy low-res CCD sensor. It’s not a camera to use everyday of course, but I got some good results with it and it feels satisfying.
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