I am back with another blog post. About a month ago I purchased the Samyang 8mm lens for the Fuji X series. My first impression of the lens are most favorable. Without getting technical. Its a good lens for the price having a nice solid feel when holding. Image quality is very good. No complaints really. If you are on the fence, JUMP!, you will like it.

When setting up the X-Pro 1 ( I assume the new camera body X-E1 settings are also the same). You want to make the following adjustments in the menus. 

1) Shoot without lens to "On"

2) Mount adapter setting, select "lens 5 or 6" and adjust to 8mm. Someone please correct me if I am wrong on this. However by doing this the camera body will recognize the 8mm as a default setting when no other Fuji lens is connected. 

3) Set servo motor to "M" not "S" or "C"

4) With fisheye its all EVF not OVF for viewing and composition.

One of my clients is the Indiana Transportation Museum. This year they had asked me to make a few runs to the North Pole with Santa. The images will be used for future marketing. So I made two runs on the Polar Bear Express covering Santa. This guy Santa, is BUSY! I decided to do a day run and then a night run. For the day I used my Nikon D300 and fill flash. Very conservative setup making sure I got some fill light into the subjects. 

BUT for the night run I knew what I wanted to achieve and the Nikon D300 was not going to do it. Out comes the most wonderful Fuji X-Pro 1. I wanted to get the mood using the ambient light. These are 1930s rail cars with very dark lighting. There were six cars on this Polar Bear Express with about 175 passengers per trip. The lighting was very different in each car. 

All settings were in Manual. I kept the ISO at 6400 and tried to keep the shutter speed above 1/125 because a bunch of old rail cars doing 20 mph gets very bumpy and I was getting blur below this shutter speed as we bounced around. Fun stuff, great challenge.

I got exactly what I was looking for. For one of the very first times, everything for the evening was shot in RAW. Usually I just shoot in the JPEG film modes. But for this trip I wanted to have the benefit of pulling detail out if needed. Side note, I used Lightroom for the RAW processing. Worked just fine for me. To many picky people out there. 

As you look at the images, the answer is yes, you are seeing correctly. The train tracks do go down the center of a street. The cars have to get out of the way. As the train approaches the town square, all the stop lights go to red and the train slowly moves through the center of town. Very cool sight to see. 

So to all a very Merry Christmas, and yes there is a North Pole, I saw it!

Blog-66

This was shot on the return from the North Pole. These cabins were very dark.

Blog-70 This image used the 35mm NOT the 8mm.

Blog-68 Trains have the right-of-way through the intersection!

Blog-67 8mm back at town square.

Blog-65 From the same intersection as the image above when I was inside.

Blog-71 35mm not 8mm, but I like this image.

Happy and Safe Holiday season to All