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So, when my wife and I decided to plan 7 months ago a trip to visit our daughter that was studying in Spain, it was the start of a long journey and introduction to Fuji. Up until then I was a Canon user, from the time I was a teenager. Fuji was never on my radar as a camera system I’d own. I didn’t want to lug around all my FF canon gear, even stripped down ( I had been using a 5D mkIII), and so asked a bunch of my photography friends what they recommended the X100V as a great travel camera. Sounded good to me, and the reviews looked good. I was willing to use a fixed lens for a trip, so I went to buy it. That’s when I discovered the x100V is rarer than a truthful politician, so searched out an alternate. I liked what I saw with the X100V, namely the super small size, and so I started looking at maybe the x-pro3. Well damn, that was as hard to find as the x100V! At this point I heard about the x-T5 coming out and I figured that I had a shot at getting that at least, seeing how hard it was to find a Fuji product. I got the X-T5 and was pretty stunned how small it was compared to my canon, and saw it was actually as small as my ancient canon a-1 I had as a teenager. I was also happy to see the dials and ergonomics was much much like the A-1 and that felt like putting on an old favorite pair of shoes. I was a bit concerned with using new equipment for a trip, but hey, YOLO. I had another trip before the one to Spain, and got to really use it at a race event and stress test the usability. I had also gotten the viltrox 75mm f/1.2 by that time and it was also a good time to test that lens for its ability to AF well. By now I was fairly comfortable with the camer, but the true raison d’etre for this journey was the Spain trip. I got back a few days ago and I have to say, the camera and entire ecosystem has brought back the pure passion for photography. The compactness of camera and lenses made the difference between a chore to take picture (which often results to just using a phone to take a picture) to always having the camera comfortably in hand and joyfully snapping away. I feel invigorated again to have a camera on hand. here are some of the pictures so far, and I’m still adding more. So many turned out well, far more than I would have thought. https://edwardpalisoc.smugmug.com/Places/Portfolio/ Be kind. 😝

It's hard to make a lens sharp over its entire focusing and aperture range. Extending the focusing range way down, for a fast lens that wasn't designed to do that (at significant extra cost), is likely to bring out a lot of aberrations. Also, the 56 f/1.2 is one of those lenses designed to create smoother bokeh, right? That has to be done either by introducing aberrations, or a plate that shades the edge of the light path, or both. After all, the visible bokeh is just bright spots that are out of focus, so if you want those to look different from a sharp image of the aperture, you have to introduce aberrations for the images at extreme focus positions. Just a general comment. I have never tried the lens you mention.

The 60mm, although very sharp, only goes down to 1:2 and doesn't work well with tubes. Look at the laowa 65mm. Totally manual, which doesn't matter much with macro, does 2:1 and is very sharp. At least mine is anyway.