A new Lens - The Fujifilm 18mm F2

There are some pretty famous Fujifilm lenses out there, there are even more people who will tell you what is the 'best fujifilm lens' and what are the worst, there are people that claim zoom lens are all horrible that primes are the only way to go.

Of course all of this advice is generally speaking, rubbish. The best lens is the one you have, whatever you can afford and whatever you feel comfortable using. The best lens is the one that suits your shooting style.

I have a lot of lens - this isn't a boast or anything, I'm lucky enough in life to be able to afford to buy things I want, and if you are going to be one of those people who buys a lot of photography equipment, skip the random accessories and focus on lenses. You see lens a)last longer because they don't tend to be superceeded for 8-10 years and even when they do the older ones still have value. You can buy a lens, use it for 3-4 years and sell it again for about the same price.

And the advice is always 'Invest in Glass' a good lens will make much more difference to your photography than the latest and greatest new camera.

The lens I bought this week is not great, according to the internet it's the worst fujifilm lens' but you should listen to the internet. The lens in question is Fujifilm's 18mm (about 27mm full frame) F2 prime lens. It is small (half way between the pancake 27mm and the 23mm, 35mm and 50mm primes which are all larger than this) so I figured if I could pick up one cheap it might be worth having.

And I found one secondhand that was cheap, so I bought it and a day later it turned up and for the last few days I've had it on the front of my Fujifilm X-T20 and here are some shots.

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Early morning from my balcony - that's a fairly bright sunrise going on there and it's coping with it okay - none of the vertical lines are too straight, but I wouldn't really expect them to be this wide.

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Later that night - okay this had some down and dirty post work done to it, but given how dark it was out there and that this is taken wide open I'm reasonably impressed with the look

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Post is there again - punched right up - but I like the tones in this - the smoothness in the bricks.

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Okay this is the type of stuff I do a lot of and this is where I'm pretty impressed - 18mm is a reasonable angle for this sort of thing, it's not so wide that you are creating something that isn't there, but wide enough to get a fair amount of the building in - lines are straight and I think it's coping with the shadows quite well.

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This one works even better for me - shadows, bright sky and great feeling of actually being in the curve of the building.

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This shot is maybe not as successful - but I don't think that is the lens' fault - I think that with a pandemic I'm out of practice in photographing people in the street - I was shooting from the waist whilst moving - always difficult - but I do like the shadows on the couple so here it is in this collection.

So is it a good lens? It's okay - it doesn't blow you away like the 50mm prime or the 10-24mm zoom but that is mainly because both of them so you something unusual, a field of view we are not used to as humans. 18mm, 27mm in full frame is pretty close to what you see when you walk around, so things look nature, it is a documentry lens - it shows you what is there, not what isn't like some others. But I'm glad I bought it - I feel due to it's small size I will end up using it quite a bit.

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