I would love to say I was singing in the rain last Friday, but I was anticipating some pain given that I was on my way to Convent Garden to pick up my MacBook Pro from being serviced. It had developed (or had always had) pits in the screen that looked like stuck pixels. I had had a palaver over it once already when the store in Westfield Stratford refused to believe that it was anything other than something I had caused. Perhaps my jokes about testing my tiny drill on my laptop screen didn’t go down too well…

In any event, the store in Covent Garden had accepted it was a defect in the screen that needed fixing, which was great, but the Genius Bar there was one of the busiest I’ve ever seen. It resembled something akin to to the “mob football” of the Royal Shrovetide Football match…

When I returned it was a good bit less busy, so it was simply manically busy, rather than a situation in which you were invited to perch on other customers heads. While there I decided to take my X-E1 for a walk with my Fuji 14mm mounted. Writing this post had me thinking on a post someone had left for me (completely well intentioned) on a well known social networking site to the effect that the poster liked my photos with my D800E but not the stuff I post from my Fujifilm X cameras. I’m not going to deny that Fullframe sensors have better output (in general) than APS-C sensors.

However, taking pictures for me is about two things, taking the pictures and appreciating the results. For both of those two things I have fun with, and enjoy, my Fuji cameras. The results may not be quite full frame quality but they are great at all ISOs and frankly do have a quality very like real film. Whoever painted the results as being similar to the Contax G2 couldn’t have been more right.

The RX1 is a similar camera, but the lack of a shutter speed dial is an issue. The D800E is a fine camera, but all to often I am fighting with it. I completely acknowledge that’s mostly down to the Nikon menu system, and will get better over time, but all too often I find I have to think far too hard to get good results such that my composition suffers. No doubt I’m just hard of thought!

The Fuji 14mm is a really very fine lens. Very sharp (impressively consistent across the frame too), distortion free (optically corrected), and good contrast. It’s not a huge lens either (having used the Nikon 14-24mm I feel qualified to comment!). I like the manual focus mechanism too, it’s great for street work. If I some some very minor criticisms it would be that the corners are relatively softer wide open (this is completely standard in WA lenses and this lens is much better than most) and I would prefer a touch more saturation in the results.

Taken with my Fujifilm X-E1 and 14mm XF lens