I had the opportunity to send some quality time with the Fuji XPRO2 two weeks ago. I was onset shooting, documenting season 6 of Cooking Hawaiian Style on the beach of the 4 Seasons at Ko'olina. Made a big & scary decision to shoot exclusively with the XPRO2. Not knowing what to expect I set it to shoot raw + jpeg.
Panic mode...
On Wednesday night the week before the shoot, I went back to check my focal lengths that I was shooting the earlier seasons & realized it varied using a 24-70mm lens. I was planning to use 2 prime lens 35mm (50mm full frame equivalent) & a 56mm (85mm full frame equivalent). After thinking about it, changing lens out on a beach with the wind blowing sand & salt spray onto my sensor was a bad idea! 1st thing Thursday morning at 5am, I called & placed an order for the fujinon 16-55mm f2.8 LM WR & made sure that it would arrive at my doorstep on Friday with UPS Next Day Air, & it did!
Editing...
Monday morning took a look at the raw files next to the jpegs, so totally blown away at the sharpness, colors & quality of the jpeg files!!! Threw all the jpegs into a separate collection in Lightroom & started editing only the jpegs. I don't think I even touched any of the raw files, the jpegs were that good!!! 4 days & 30 hours of editing, I have my final edits uploaded to my Dropbox. I now have my normal life back, & ready for the weekend!!!
Aperture setting...
Had a few quirks about the camera & lens, on the XPRO 2 there is no aperture settings dial on the top of the camera. The aperture is controlled by the aperture dial on the lens & because of that I was inadvertently changing the aperture all the time by the way I was holding & steading the camera with both hands. My fix was to use gaffer tape to lock down the aperture ring a little medieval but it worked! The 16-55mm (24-85mm full frame equivalent) is sharp as nails, love the quality of the images coming from that lens!
Sucky Battery Life...
As expected with any camera that used a EVF & back LCD screen, the battery life was just as bad as my Sony A7S II! I went through 5 batteries each day, Sat. & Sun. Finding power on the beach with the film crews video, dslr cameras & multiple monitors, lights & computers was not going to happen. I was able to charge 1 batter at the prep kitchen, which was about 50 yards away from the set.
SD Cards & Backups...
In 2 days, I burned through 6, 32gb cards & 2, 16gb cards. The XPRO 2 has a dual card slots, so I set it up so the 2nd card would do a auto backup of every image on the 1st card. After finishing each episode I would walk back up to home base in the hotel, another 50 yards from the prep kitchen, & copy all the new images to an external portable drive. Then copy the same images to a lightroom catalog on my laptop. So at any given time I have a total of 4 backup copies of each episode.
4.5 STARS FOR THE XPRO 2...
I'll give the Fuji XPRO 2, 4.5 stars out of 5 Stars! Coming from a digital background & not from analog film, I did find the ISO dial a bit clumsy to use or it might have been me that was clumsy?! I feel that I still need to break in & gain muscle memory for the ISO dial, which isn't all that much of a burden, at least not for me, I know I'll get used to it. The other quirk is moving the aperture dial, inadvertently. Shooting in shutter speed priority, I found that I was increasing the shutter speed by grazing the front command dial. That command dial is exactly where my right index finger would fall when I hold my camera up to my eye. All in all with those few quirks, my final verdict is that, I love my Fuji, it makes me want to go out to shoot more. I've also rekindled my street photography fire!
Aloha a hui hou my friends!
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