Saturday, June 8, 2013

Fujinon 55-200mm Zoom Lens Test Run

I don't usually talk about equipment stuff or technical settings on this blog, but today will be an exception. I'm off to a bluegrass festival on Sunday to meet up with some old friends from Nashville who will be performing. One of the reasons I splurged on the new Fujinon zoom lens is to be able to shoot concert and festival performances, so this is the first opportunity to put this puppy to the test in a real life situation. I spent the afternoon today in the Chelsea district an the High Line of Manhattan to test out various functions and settings, and to get comfortable with using the EVF. Most importantly to see how sharp the IQ is at the full zoom distance, and to see just how many stops the Optical Image Stabilization will buy for me. I've got a bit more learning to do with using the EVF and the image stabilization, but I'm really pleased with the results I got today. I examined all the images at 100% and was quite surprised to see that I can easily hand hold the camera at 1/60th second. In some cases down to 1/30th second, and in one example below even to 1/15th second (although in a real life situation I wouldn't go slower than 1/60th second).

All the images below were shot RAW and turned into jpegs in Lightroom with no other processing, so there's some noise in the images shot at faster shutter speeds. I'll be posting some of the individual shots in the next few days after I process them for noise and do my usual b/w conversions. First the individual shots:

ISO 500, 70.5mm, f5.6, 1/250 sec



ISO 1600, 200mm, f5.6, 1/250 sec



 ISO 1000, 200mm f5.6, 1/200 sec



ISO 1600, 200mm, f8, 1/500 sec



ISO 6400, 155mm, f8, 1/500 sec



For the following series I'll post only the shutter speed since these were shot with the intention of testing the OIS. The last image is blurred because I need more practice at being patient and waiting for the camera shutter to actually take the photo before I move on to the next shot:

 1/500s

1/250s


1/125s


1/60s




With this sequence the shutter speeds are the same as the previous:





There are five shots in this next sequence. The shutter speeds are as before with the addition of the last shot at 1/30s. A tiny bit of blurring at that speed:






The next sequence has six exposures. The last one was hand held at 1/15s. I was quite surprised at the results:








The last sequence of four shots is by far the best. The four shutter speeds as the first groups, and all quite acceptable.







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