Fuji XF27, anyone?

Lounge
1

Hi, all,

Oldest son and I bought a secondhand Fuji kit last month.
He got the camera body, and I got the two prime lenses
(an XF27, and an XF50).

The XF27 is of the early type that does not have an aperture ring
(which took some time to get used to, but I managed).

My present dilemma is to understand what the XF27 really is
good for!?!

Autofocus seems sort of tricky. Autoaperture is tricky.

So far, I believe that It excels at f/8 street photography in black&white!

On the other hand, it behaves quite nicely for close-ups:
xf27

Any wise pieces of advice, please?

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

1 Like
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Hi Claes,
I don’t have the XF27 but I recently bought a mitakon 35mm 0.95 and I also had to deal with the cons of the lens and I think I found something which also could be nice for your 27mm. My problem was that the mitakon isn’t the sharpest lens and when i tried to get really clean and sharp pictures from edge to edge I was disappointed. So I found this website:

here you can tweak your jpeg-settings of the various film-simulations in a way to make them look more like an analogue film. I took a Kodak Portra 400 recipe which also includes reducing sharpening of the jpeg. Now it doesn’t really bother that the mitakon isn’t that sharp because it gets more of an analogue look anyway. And back in the days it wasn’t that important to get a lot of sharpness from edge to edge. I could imagine that this could be also quite fun with the 27mm.

Have fun. : )

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Exactly! An Ilford Pan F 50 recipe is the one which I used
for the “street photography in b&w”. Works beautifully!

What makes my puzzled is that an image of the front garden
in colour looks … … too busy?

G’nite!

4

It’s good at being small. An X-E{1,2,3,4} can just about fit into a jacket pocket with the XF 27 mounted.

Actually, my number one lens wish for Fujifilm is a XF 27 f/1.4 in the old 35 f/1.4 style. I’d love a lens like that. Or better yet, an X100 variant with a built-in 27mm lens.

But as it stands, the XF 27 isn’t my favorite, either. Its bokeh tends to be a bit ringy and busy at near distances, its autofocus is on the slow side, and it doesn’t focus particularly close. It’s pretty sharp, though, even in the corners. And I’ve gotten some terrific environmental portraits of my kids with this lens. F/2.8 is enough to mildly blur the background at head-and-torso distances in a pleasing, subtle way, and the focal length lends itself to that sort of portrayal.

We have one on my daughter’s camera, because the lens is relatively robust and affordable. Probably half our pictures of me come from that combo. (My daughter is five).

2 Likes
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I agree with bastibe. I’ve seen some great landscapes, street and environmental photography with that lens. Omar(I’m assuming we all know him :grinning:) has some great videos with it. Even though I have a X100V it is tempting to look at an X-E* with such a lens.

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@hatsnp Omar? Omar Gonzalez?

x X x

It looks as if I and the little lens slowly begin to understand each other.

Here we almost agreed on where focus ought to be.

almost
almost912Ă—353 344 KB

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

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Yep

Looks like a piece of wood?

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@hatsnp

Looks like a piece of wood?

Not a bad guess :slight_smile:
It is the stem of a pear (Pyrus communis),
i.e. what is left after I have eaten the rest of the fruit,
and it rests on a sheet from a common kitchen roll.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

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I also thought it was a piece of cloth… Macro perspectives are sometimes very deceiving :grin: