Spanish Village - Balboa Park

[Chris Dodkin]

If there was a place designed to test color photography, it would look just like the Spanish Village in Balboa Park - San Diego. It's a 3D color testcard on steroids!

This is an 'artist village' of galleries, studios and shops - and is situated close to the 'World Famous' San Diego Zoo.

I decided to give the much maligned (online) Fuji 18mm lens a full work-out on the X-Pro1 - and shoot the whole set in Fuji's Velvia Film Simulation mode.

I used a CPL on all shots - and also used Fuji's DR400 mode on some of the shots to deal with high contrast scenes.

Sorry - completely spammed the thread with pictures, but I'm loving the Velvia on the X-Pro1, and the 18mm lens

 

[Brian Moore]

Great shots! I LOVE the look of that Velvia film, Chris. I'll have to try some myself!

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Thanks Brian - you going to try the version in the green box?

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Wow, talk about crazy paving! Looks like an interesting place. Great colours, of course. What's the problem with the 18mm lens?

 

[Pete Askew]

Nice series Chris and the lens looks like it coped pretty well. I guess the contrast was pretty high on the day and then simulation etc coped well. I guess I might suggest that its fine contrast is a bit low in strong light but when you can process raw files that might well all change and I don't know what the orginal scene looked like anyway. How does its rendering compare with the other optics? And I see you found a subject to show on DPR too!! (Actually you shoud post the one under the window and say you found the rendering opf straight lines rather poor!! ).

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Thanks chaps

Rob, there are various posts online form folks who think the 18mm lens is poor, or sub standard in it's edge sharpness.

Suspect they fall into the 'never really happy, I'll wait for the next one before I take any pictures' category

It's all relative for the price/size - I don't think it's as sharp as the 35mm, but then I'd say the wide lens on my 5D2 isn't as sharp as my 50mm, so really I'm just stating the bleedin' obvious at that point!

It's interesting to see how people justify not moving forward with a product, and then post about it on places like DPR - we've said it before... there's a lot of strange folk on there!

Thanks Pete, the contrast in strong light is being impact by the dynamic range settings that the camera uses to generate the initial exposure, then pull the JPEG from that. It's got some tricks in there, which I'd like to get around with my normal RAW workflow - but we're still waiting for Adobe to catch up with a new ACR release.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Rob - looks like actual testing of the 18mm lens aligns with my personal viewpoint

Fujifilm X-Pro1, La Prueba - Ópticas XF - DSLR Magazine

XF Fujinon 18 mm f / 2 R for Fujifilm X-Pro1: Conclusion

In short, a superb angular light equivalent to a 28 mm f / 2, which can be used without issue from full aperture of f / 2, rivaling the best of fixed optical market with similar characteristics.

The tests are written up in Spanish, so non-Spanish speakers might want to use the excellent Google translate feature to read in badly translated English

Their general conclusion on all three lenses:

Fujifilm aims XF: Conclusion

Overall it appears that these three objectives-served by the X-Trans sensor and processor, the key to this team, they behave almost exactly as it was hoped that they would do in theory: an extraordinary image quality, reminiscent of the best times of the optical telemetry and high-definition movies.

And we talk of the optical behavior, no garage, but the rings have the luxury of diaphragm settings click diaphragm thirds point, with some slack I must say, manual focus is "by wire", that is assisted by an electric motor which may not please the purists, we suspect the price to pay for a mixed-use AF / MF in sizes restrained.

Similarly, in a first contact lenses, built mostly of aluminum, could pass for too light, especially accustomed to the strength and weight of conventional optical purely mechanical, however after some experience with the team did not sincerely believe that this involves a problem for any potential user .

 

[Davie Hudson]

Brilliant shots, I used to love using the film simulation on my old S100FS .. excellent venue too , reminds me of Portmerion with better weather lol

 

[Chris Dodkin]

reminds me of Portmerion with better weather lol

Thanks Davie - spot-on with your description too

 

[Hamish Gill]

.. excellent venue too , reminds me of Portmerion with better weather lol

HA ... thats exactly what I was thinking!!!!

Lovely shots Chris
We are obviously looking at relatively small images here so its quite difficult to comment on edge sharpness ... but it looks pretty good from what is visible!
Same old same old with dpr ... and a good portion of the rest of the internet for that matter. One self appointed expert expresses an opinion and others follow