A Very Brief Review of the Fujinon XF 35mm 1.4 lens
I'm just going to focus on the lens for this review, so the same goes if you have this on a XPro 1, XE1, XM1 or any other X camera, either way this lens is awesome, just incredible.
As with the other reviews I'm gonna go mostly images on this one with a brief bit about why you should get this lens and just how awesome it is. It is sharp, damn sharp even at 1.4 and for the price it is a steal, sure its more expensive than your standard 50mm prime but its in whole other league, this is what you need if you have an X series system, if you gave me one camera and one lens to shoot a whole wedding I would do it on this, well I have done it on this albeit as a second shooting but I would be more than comfortable rocking this and only this for any wedding.
Focusing
Focusing is good with the latest firmware, pretty quick and very accurate, only in low light will you get some missed focus and a bit of hunting. The trick to this is to know what you are using, the fuji cameras use contrast detection [although this is changing as per the XE2] which means they are looking for strong lines of contrast to determine focal distance, if you are having trouble try to lock onto high contrast areas, such as a dark jacket against the white of a shirt. After some practice with this lens you will find it a much more comfortable thing to use, still no where near the speed of some DSLR lenses such as the 24-70 but this is a different beast altogether.
Manual Focus is tricky due to the 'by-wire' system, not impossible and the focus peaking really helps with this, but to be honest this isn't the best lens for manual focus.
If you are having trouble getting focus locked on a fast moving target then try this trick, line up your shot and full press the shutter right away, no half press to focus, in doing this the camera will focus and fire straight away, this is by no means a perfect way of shooting and you will still get missed shots, but as a last resort it can work.
Another way of achieving focus is to use the back button, and this can work well for some people as the camera becomes a bit more responsive, I think the main shock people have of this camera is when you half press to focus a second half press will refocus the entire frame again, pretty annoying if you are firing off multiple frames but there is a workaround. Switch the camera to manual focus, then use the AE-L / AF-L button on the back at the top right to focus, this leaves you shutter finger free to fire multiple shots without re-focusing, try it out, it's pretty slick.
1/640th - F/5 - iso200
1/2400th - F/1.4 - iso2500
1/400th - F/1.4 - iso200
Sharpness
Peoples main love of this lens comes from its outstanding sharpness, I'm not going to make tests and charts, but show two examples of just how good it is, even wide open, which is how I shoot this lens most of the time. You can click the images to get a full screen view, with the crop the images start to soften up and grain becomes a bit more noticeable, but it really doesn't matter, you shouldn't have to crop this aggressively anyways, but if you ever need to the option is there.
I do like a nice sharp lens, for me an images that are as crisp as the ones this lens produces are the kind that I want to create for my clients.
1/3800th - F/2.8 - iso200
A crop from the image above
1/170th - F/1.4 - iso1250
A crop form the image above
Summary
Thats about it for my review, I like to keep it brief, in terms of other aspects of this lens such as chromatic aberrations, light fall off and all that jazz you can find that in a million other reviews, and to be honest none of that stuff matters when you have captured an awesome moment.
For now here are a bunch of sample photographs shot with this lens, some weddings and a few other projects, as always feel free to share around and leave a comment below.
-Cheers
