ranger9

Steve is always very enthusiastic about whatever his new favorite thing is. I find that somewhat charming -- it makes me nostalgic for when I was younger and always hopeful that the next new piece of gear would make my photos more significant. As long as I don't conflate "enthusiasm" with "value," I can still enjoy reading his site.

Another tip: If your camera has "high performance mode," turn it OFF unless you actually need it (for fast-moving subjects with continuous AF, for example.) You might think you want "high performance" all the time, but in my experience it seems to cut battery life almost in half.

Slightly different slant: If you want to use your flash off-camera, you need to buy TWO EF-X500s (one to use as a transmitter) and you're still limited by the vagaries of optical transmission. It may actually cheaper to buy a Roboshoot X20 radio system and a cheap Nikon-compatible flash (the X20 translates between Fuji and Nikon protocols) plus you get the advantage of radio instead of optical control. I've been using the Roboshoot with a Nikon-flavor Flashpoint V860 II flash (lithium-powered) with 100% reliability. John Poremba, the engineer of the Roboshoot system, says he'll be adding HSS compatibility as soon as Fuji pushes out the rest of its HSS firmware updates so he can test against them. I have no connection to the Roboshoot system, but I admit I'm kind of a cheerleader because it's still little-known, available right now, and works really well. (Meanwhile, in the long run I'll still be waiting for Godox/Flashpoint to roll out a TTL/HSS trigger for Fuji, so I can control my mix of studio flashes and speed lights.)

Okay, here's a slightly different perspective, from someone who had an X-T 10 and sold it to buy an X-Pro 2 (just to get OVF): The X-T 10 is a REALLY nice camera. In a lot of ways I think it's the best camera Fuji makes. It has a handy compact size and light weight; control placements are good and handling is as good as it gets in the Fuji world; the EVF is really nice; real-world AF performance is just fine; picture results are excellent; and it's much more sensibly priced than Fuji's newer high-end cameras. Why would you walk away from all that? It's not like you're not missing out on much. The big-buck Fujis have weather sealing, but do you need that? The difference between 24mp and 16mp is trivial in the real world (it only increases your maximum print size by 1.2x) and the 24mp sensor introduces some new problems (harsher tonal transitions, more noise in midtone shadows.) If you really cared about video you probably wouldn't be using Fuji. You've already got the best of what Fuji has to offer. Stick with it!

Yup, it's too slow, and the other thing that annoys me is that it's locked while you're tracking focus, which means you can't recompose while trying to follow a moving subject. I'm like some of the other posters -- I still use it, but I'm disappointed that it isn't really as useful as I was led to believe by the early reviews.

My impression is that my new X-Pro 2 has pretty good low-light AF, but no better than that of my X-T 10. Comparing different people's experiences is tricky because there are so many factors in play. Shorter lenses are more of a challenge for phase-detect AF than longer ones because they produce less phase separation, and some subjects (e.g. ones with strong perpendicular lines) are more phase-detect-friendly than others. So if you're in a scenario in which PD falls short, you're back to ol' contrast AF... and that's still an area where I feel Fuji lags behind Olympus and Panasonic, to name two.

Quoting lenses in "35mm equivalent" is like quoting your new car's gas mileage in "horse equivalent" bushels of grain per furlong.

The photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, identified in this post as staged, was not staged. The photographer, Joe Rosenthal, has explained this thoroughly many times over the years. He took the original photo of the flag-raising as an unstaged grab shot. Later, realizing that editors would want the faces to be visible, he staged a photo with the soldiers standing smiling in front of the flag. He then filed his pictures and went on with his work. Later, without having seen which photo was used in the press, he met another photographer who congratulated him on the photo and asked if it had been staged. Assuming that it was the set-up photo that had been used, he said, "Sure." It was only later that he discovered it was the unstaged photo that had become famous… but his momentary misunderstanding has clouded the facts ever since. (Many articles are available that show both photos, making it clear that the photo of the smiling soldiers was the staged one.) Of course this does not invalidate the contention that photographs are selected and interpreted according to the user's desired representation of a situation. But if one intends to take photographers to task for making inaccurate claims, it is important that one takes care to make sure one's own claims are accurate.

Of course, what you're actually looking at is your monitor, showing PNG files, showing screenshots of Lightroom compare views. But of course there's no way any of that could be influencing the results. Far better to form unshakeable conclusions based on personal beliefs than get confused by mere "static testing." I can see I've been wasting my time here...

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