Search the Community

THIS IS A COPY OF AN EMAIL I HAVE SENT TO FUJI. IF ANY OF YOU HAVE ANY IDEAS, I'D LOVE TO HEAR THEM! I purchased a new XT10 (s/n 67L03084) along with 2 kit lenses in November of this year. The 16-50 lens s/n is 62H09098. The s/n of the 50-230 lens is 62H00965. I have also booked a holiday to the Arctic Circle with the sole intention of shooting the Northern Lights. Last night was clear so I took the camera out to try some star pics to see how it performed. I know that autofocus is unlikely to work under such conditions, so I set the camera to manual focus and set it at the extreme end of its scale, i.e. infinity. The resultant pictures were all blurred. I then experimented and found that infinity is in focus when the camera suggests there’s still some way to go. I have repeated this experiment during daylight and it seems the 16-50 kit lens doesn’t focus on infinity when it’s set to infinity. When I am photographing the Northern Lights, the temperature will be in the region of minus 20 degrees and it is extremely unlikely that I will be able to set the focus in such conditions using trial and error (actually, having spent a fair amount of money on said camera, why should I have to use trial and error?). Furthermore, if it’s just stars, there will be insufficient light for me to manually focus anyway, so I could be out in the freezing cold taking blurred pictures and I’ll only find that out when I upload them to a computer once inside the hotel. So, my questions are: 1. Am I doing something wrong? 2. If not, what is the next step? I need the camera to take pictures of the Northern Lights and it looks like it may not be up to the job. Attached are four files; 2 taken with the focus set on infinity (both blurred) and the other 2 with me manually focussing and ignoring infinity.

Hello:) So I'm doing a little bit of photography for quite some time now, my first camera was a Canon powershot A495 compact, I later swiched to an Olympus E-PL1 with its kit lens, then started using my Samsung S7 then S10 and recently I got myself a fuji X-S10 also with the kit lens (the XF 18-55 f/2.8-4) https://sivael.gensys.pl/ The first 10 images (~two top rows) are from fuji. I want to do more portaits, shoot and film weddings/events as well as do some macro stuff(with a 16mm ring I think?) I'm thinking about a second lens and my main contenders are 35mm f/2 - for shallower DOF when shooting portaits, great video quality (kit lens at 35mm is f/3.6) 23mm f/2 - is this better or worse for portaits? (kit lens is f/3.2) 50mm f/1 - portaits should be very interesting with this one, but would they not be *too* shallow for good results? (kit lens is at f/4) 90mm f/2 - a long lens but some said it's very good for portaits. It would also give me more range for shooting nature. Maybe one of the zoom lenses? I find that having the ability to zoom gives more flexibility to catch that event and frame it just a little bit wider than needed to cut to size later. I also don't want too many large lenses so the kit + something small + a zoom telephoto seems attractive to me but I don't have much experience there so I don't really know. I'm looking for practical advice on which lenses to look at for portaits and event shooting in both picture and video format.