KateR

Thankyou all, that gives me confidence that if I work hard enough, it's doable! OK so f5.6 to f8 as a starting point, great. I always shoot raw so I can faff with the dynamic range / exposure latitude later, and will probably do that rather than trying to deal with filters etc. I know that I also have to be realistic, I only have a couple of days in Moab and a shot like that could take weeks of persistence until the right conditions come together (and that'd be the day i forgot the right lens, anyway...), just interested in whether I could hope for that sort of clarity. And I appreciate that the best setup in the world won't help if the light is rubbish. Plus I have the "grumbling partner" handicap, so all in it's very much going to be making the best of a bad job - one day if i'm very very good I might even find myself in an amazing landscape on my own so that I can concentrate purely on getting a shot... I actually didn't know about the panorama mode, so i'll look into that and have a play before I leave!

I recently came back from a trip to south africa with some really disappointing landscape shots from my X-Pro1. Having never really done much landscape stuff, I thought all i had to do to get lovely depth of field was whack the lens up to its maximum aperture and check that the shutter speed was still within safe limits. Turned out not so much, and when i posted about it on the forum I learned about diffraction (and also never using the high DR settings unless i want high ISO-a-go-go). So, I'm about to go to the US and this time thought i'd ask the question upfront. For really epic landscapes with huge depth (the kind of thing at the top of this page: Delicate Arch Photo Tips - Arches National Park - Fototripper ): 1) Have I got any chance of getting near that with my camera, or is this serious full frame territory? (i keep being told there's nothing the X-Pro can't do, etc ) 2) Lenses coming with me include the 18mm f2, the 35mm f1.4, and the 55-200 zoom. Assuming that light isn't an issue (and even if it is, as i'll be taking a tripod for once!), can anyone advise me on the optimum aperture for the best results in terms of depth of field and clarity? Everything always looks dandy to me on the screen, by the time i get home to check things out on the large monitor it's too late! 3) Other than locking down the ISO and using a tripod and timer to minimise wobble, anything else I should be doing? Really grateful for any tips. It'd be lovely to not come home sad again. Especially as most of the best shots seem to involve getting up at a time i generally consider to be torture, let alone on holiday... thanks, Kate

I currently have 18, 27, 35 and an old manual 50. Not planned, the 18 and 27 came with the camera. I'm addicted to the 27, oddly! I love how tiny it is and have just got used to the field of view. The 18 I just never use. Totally unable to bond with the 35, which I expected to adore. Field of view is either too narrow or too wide, and I love wide apertures for narrow DOF rather than low light performance but at 35mm that hardly happens. Should have saved a few more pennies and got the 56, which I can see myself trading to soon anyway. Then I just came back from a road trip where zooming with my feet just wasn't an option on so many occasions where I could see a shot. I missed my old canon 100mm like crazy. So could see myself ending up with 27, 56, 90.

Milandro, mine is an MC rokkor-PG, I can see from a bit more research, which is the earliest, heaviest 1973-77 model. Not that it explains anything, there is a Ken Rockwell review of that exact model which says it should be excellent!

well...it *looks* fine, as in no obvious signs of damage, but I don't really know what to look for. Maybe I could try taking it to the camera shop in central London where I bought my Fuji, seemed to be run by proper enthusiasts, and see if they can spot anything.

This is probably another daft question (i seem to be specialising in them lately) but i'm stuck. I have a Minolta Rokkor 50mm 1.4 that I "inherited" when my partner's uncles house was being cleared. I don't know how old it is or what version, i think there were many, and not sure how to find out. I'm mounting it on my X-Pro 1 with a K&F Concept adapter - this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Concept-Minolta-Rokkor-Fujifilm-Adapter/dp/B00L7EHNCQ/ the fit is fine, but i can't seem to get focus on anything beyond about 20 feet, let alone infinity. The amazon listing says i should be getting infinity focus and i don't see anyone else complaining in the reviews, so i'm wondering if i'm doing something wrong. tbh none of the focus is great, i have "shoot without lens" and focus peaking set up but really struggle to get anything much sharp below about f5.6...i get the focus peak lines show up but as soon as I half press the shutter it's obvious that the focus is really soft. But that could just be because i'm bad at manually focusing, despite trying constantly! Is anyone else using this lens on the X-Pro and getting infinity focus?

Thanks guys - i couldn't figure out how to find the DR setting in the exif. Maybe I leaned on something in the Quick Access menu, really odd as this is the only shot that appears to have those settings and I certainly don't remember putting in DR 400 deliberately. Your versions look much better I have just started with Lightroom... i used to use PSE but an old version, which wouldn't handle the XPro raf files, so i was processing from the jpg. Lightroom seems to be hugely better at cleaning up stuff (noise / sharpness) so will start again in LR with the raw file and see what i can do. Looks like Gradient Filters might be my friend to stop the sky washing out, too! Thanks again for all your help

Hi Aswald - I was shooting in Aperture Priority, with Auto ISO and the limit set at 800. The mystery is why the camera picked ISO800 under conditions like these - the light couldn't have been any brighter! I take your point about UV and hoods - both things I have but in the gloomy UK weather they'd been in the bottom of my bag for so long i forget to pack them for Africa - total rookie error! Have also discovered "dehaze" in lightroom since then, which might rescue me a little bit.

Trying again with the link for the raw file, for the noisy Auto ISO image: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ly3pl488wtm9jzw/AACIBZxPjKQjf8W6K3rdCZ4Qa?dl=0

aaargh, it was right there after the "at". Presumablythe genius forum software removed it. Am out on phone now, will have to find the link when I'm at my desk tomorrow

Hi all Have got the raw file up at if anyone wants to have a look. I can't see any info about DR setting in Photoshop, but i probably just don't know where to look. Would be interested to see what you think about the Auto ISO results and settings, and whether i did have something set there that would justify ISO 800. Re. the more general principle of big DoF for landscape photography, what would be the optimum settings for something like the attached? (taken as ISO200. f16, 1/105sec) Assuming i'm using the 18mm or 27mm lenses, I'm mentally getting caught in a tradeoff between wide angle to capture the panorama, and not being able to go very small with the aperture because of diffraction. Are all the amazing front-to-back pin sharp shots i see using 35mm or even medium format, or is it reasonable to expect great results from my Xpro setup if i'm using it right?!

Thanks everyone for replying! This is a great group. I will post the .RAF in a bit if it doesn't foul up the upload limits. Right now my laptop is downloading Lightroom which seems set to take all night! Couple of things...I know both shots are suboptimally lit, but that is a fact of life for me when travelling. I am always with my partner and trying to grab time to get anything..if I get 20 seconds to check settings before I take the shot, that's luxury! This is one of the things that makes me wonder if I should take a good phone camera for travelling and save the less idiot proof camera for when I'm not under pressure to be done with it I have been dealing with the colour cast in post processing. WB set to Auto or Daylight ("blinding light that can flay the skin off a rhino" not being an option) gives near identical results..still a bit poor I think. Well the f16 thing is news to me! Am I losing it or do other systems go up to f32? ,I didn't think that f11 or f14 was that extreme, and assumed I just wouldn't get the DoF in that huge expansive landscape on a larger aperture. Rats. Somewhat too late to fix that one now

Hi knowledgeable peeps, I swapped over from a Canon 60D to the X-Pro about six months ago. I've just got back from a trip around South Africa, where i'd sworn off my previous obsession with tiny DoF due to far too many out of focus shots, and as this was mostly going to be scenery and bright light, i went for the f10+ end of things. I usually shoot in Aperture priority mode, with Auto ISO enabled because i tend not to notice when the shutter speed drops and it all looks fine till i get to the big screen and...bleurggh, blurry shots. However. I'm still not happy with a lot of my shots, the clarity i was hoping for just doesn't seem to be there. Auto ISO seems to be one issue; it seems to be fixated with unnecessarily high ISO values. I used to have the max set to 1600 but i pulled it back because of this issue, but it still uses the new max of 800 far too often. Attached image 1: bright sunlight (to the point where i couldn't really see what i was doing when taking the shot!), but we have a shutter speed of 1/1100 at f16 and..yes...ISO of 800. DR set to max of 200, possibly 100. WHY?! a much lower shutter speed would still have been fine and maybe there'd be less noise in the final shot. Which is exhibit B - img2.jpg, 100% crop, how horrible is that?! god it looks like it's been taken with my old mobile phone camera. That is the jpg straight out of camera - right now i don't have the latest version of Lightroom which will handle the raw files, i had a play with Silkypix development and it wasn't any better really. Second thing is a big tendency towards very blue colour cast. I've seen this in a few places where there was a lot of blue sky / water in the shot...maybe I should know to correct / set WB manually under those circumstances but I don't think i ever had to with my Canon. Example in img3.jpg - yes that was a white shirt he was wearing. What am I doing wrong? Feeling pretty frustrated right now as my swap was driven by never carrying the DSLR kit because it was awkward and heavy. Having solved that problem, the shots i'm getting are often worse quality than my other half's, who whipped his iphone out, pointed it at random and got nicer looking (albeit smaller!) images than I did with the "proper" camera standing next to him any thoughts much appreciated.