30 Days with the Fuji X-Pro3: Day 16

First off, I want you all to know how difficult it’s been for me to get some variety in these posts and not just show dog picture after dog picture… In COVID times, wandering the streets isn’t exactly at the top of my list of attractive activities. And when you’re doing a project in COVID times where you shoot exclusively with a camera that’s designed for street photography…you end up doing a lot of street photography type things around your house. Most of the subject matter gets old fast or is just flat out uninteresting, so you can end up with hundreds of dog pictures on your SD card every time you empty it…

This isolation/boredom can lead to getting creative, though. Halfway through this project, I switched things up and stopped using Fuji lenses and instead used some vintage lenses with an adapter. I spent a few days shooting with a Leica 50mm Summicron, which is what this image was shot with. Using a vintage lens on the X-Pro3 is…interesting. In some ways it feels natural — it’s a rangefinder-style camera using a classic rangefinder lens, the manual focus lens + brilliant focus peaking in the EVF means I can actually hit some of these shallow depth of field shots, etc. — but in other ways it just feels weird. The balancing is completely off, for example. The Summicron + the adapter makes the camera look super goofy and very front-heavy. Plus the crop factor of the APS-C sensor means that the 50mm lens has a ~75mm equivalent focal length, which starts to feel a little long for rangefinder-style documentary shots. Either way, it’s a blast to switch things up in this way!