Capture one

Fujifilm Australia were kind enough to lend me their Fujifilm XF 14mm F2.8 R lens which I took on a trip to Los Angeles earlier this year. Now to be honest, I don’t like getting too technical with the lens reviews as there are plenty of them out there on sites like cameralabs.com or dpreview.com. My approach is more practical usage, application and challenges with a lens. And of course sharing some real images that I’ve taken with the lens.

So one of the day trips during this trip was at Rodeo drive in Beverly Hills, with my family as we did some shopping and checked out what this street was about.

Rodeo Drive is prime location for all the big brands & boutique showrooms for clothes, shoes and handbags. On one of the ends Wilshire Boulevard is the famous Beverly Wilshire Hotel (as seen in the movie Pretty Woman) which is an amazing luxury hotel dating back to 1928.

Anyways I seem to be drifting away from the topic, so let’s get back to the lens. I was using this lens on my Fujifilm X-T1 which had just survived a direct fall on to concrete a few days ago (see the post Fujifilm X-T1 Cheats Death at Universal Studios if you interested in learning more) and using it to take a combination of images.

The Rolls Royce above is parked outside a Bijan store and the image was taken about a metre or 3 feet away from the car itself so you can see that coverage of this 14mm lens is pretty good. Actually the image has been straightened so it was even wider out of the camera.

You can see in the below vertical image the edges are getting stretched which is one of the characteristics of a wide angle lens. However the lines are nice and straight even close to the edge, we don’t see any barrel distortion. Another beauty of the Fujifilm system is that the lens corrections are applied in the photos that’s take itself and therefore there is no need to do this in Lightroom or Camera Raw.

The photo of the hotel Beverly Wilshire, I took on purpose with the name “David Webb” close to the edge. You will notice there is not much stretching of the letters in the name. D and B are almost the same width.

When taking people portraits which become more environmental capturing the surroundings as well as the main subject, you want to make sure that the subject being photographed is not close to the edge of the frame otherwise their face/head will appear stretched.

Beverly Wilshire
Rodeo Drive
Beverly Wilshire
Portraits

The image of me & my daughter was taken by my wife is taken only half a metre or one and a half foot away so you can see how much coverage this lens provides. It is really really wide and barely appears to have any major distortion along the edges.

Let me know how you find this lens, what kind of images you take with it. I always love seeing and getting inspiration from images created by fellow photographers.

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