It’s been snowing like crazy the last few days here in southern Japan which is rather rare.
It’s also been a while since I’ve shot in the snow, so the other night I grabbed my X-T3 and 90mm and took this opportunity and go out in the usual fashion as a creepy foreigner to wander the street at night with a camera taking peoples of random people minding their own business. Fun!
The nice thing about a 90mm is you’re not right up in people’s faces being a weirdo and I do like to keep the subjects a bit smaller in the frame so I have a bit more space, but the problem with a 90mm is you have to point the lens directly at the person, there is no getting around it. If people see you, they know you’re taking their picture. It’s not like a 23mm or 16mm where you can have the lens pointing completely to the left or right of someone while still keeping them in the frame.
And it looks a little something like this.
The Fujifilm 90mm is one of their best lenses, if not THE best lens in my opinion. I would actually argue that it is THE best lens Fujifilm ever made so far. What about the 16mm? No, the 16mm has a very strange soap bubble boke that causes it to do very strange things and it’s sometimes unusable when dealing with little bokeh balls wide open at night. Like when shooting firefly photography.
The 90mm has no real flaws holding it back – even with street shooting as you can see in more of my street photography with the Fujifilm 90mm f2 lens.
And it’s odd that it almost never gets mentioned or talked about. Most people talk about the 56mm or the 50mm when it comes to portrait photography, and the wider lenses when it comes to street photography. But the compression that comes from a 90mm is just magic, you just need a lot of space.
To be honest, it’s a little difficult to use for street photography unless you’re in a place with open spaces with lots of distance and nice backgrounds, so you probably wouldn’t want to pick up a 90mm lens for street photography if you don’t live in a city that will work with it.
Shooting in the snow with the X-T3 was a little complicated as it kicks the AF’s butt a little bit. Not because the camera is bad or anything, but because there is a tendency for the camera to want to focus on the bigger snowflakes that catch the light just right that drops in front of the lens.
Already the X-T3 probably isn’t the best camera for tracking in the dark (but it’s not too bad), throw some snow everywhere, and then it struggles a little bit more. But, you can get around this by just throwing the camera in burst mode, and then you’re guaranteed at least a couple of good ones out of the burst. So I was able to work around any issues with missed focus from the camera focusing on the little particles instead of the subject.
Next, I’ll try to underexpose a bit to protect the highlights a bit more. There is some nice lighting with some interesting signage and I think I could use it to get a pretty cool Blade Runner vibe in some areas if I get the exposure right.
Also, let me know if you like these kinds of posts, or be sure to check out my lists of Fujifilm lenses to look for any more content on Fuji-related lenses.
