Pergear 12mm f2 HDR Samples | Fukuoka Japan

To further test the Pergear 12mm f2’s capabilities and collect more sample photos for the upcoming review, I took this little guy out for some night street HDR shooting with a tripod in Fukuoka, Japan.

This lens is very interesting and fun for the price. I found it doesn’t perform great with regards to flaring and shooting into the sun when compared to the Rokinon 12mm that costs more than twice as much ( so not amazing for landscape work ). Still, this Pergear lens has some nice sun-star effects, which could make it a bit more interesting for night cityscapes where lighting conditions aren’t as harsh.

For these shots, I went down to the Tenjin area of Fukuoka, Japan, with a tripod. I just shot JPG because I like the HDR effects that you can get from the Fujifilm X-T3. I’ve just found this to be a bit quicker than dealing with RAWs.

Typically if I was shooting for prints or something fancy, I would shoot RAW with exposure brackets +-2EV at ISO 100, but since I was just shooting randomly for fun, and kinda hanging out, RAW+JPG was fine.

Hopefully, Fujifilm adopts HEIC for their next-generation cameras ( like Canon ) so we can at least get 10-bit images with their baked-in looks.

I threw some of my presets on top of the JPG effect the camera created based on Classic Chrome with a warmer WB shift to color these. It worked out well.

I also added some Grain after pumping the Texture just a little in Lightroom. Since there was a little bit of noise from shooting at ISO 640, this kind of masks, the noise by making the images feel like they have a little bit of grit.

I also used the Transform tool to straighten things out for some of these shots. In others, I left them alone because I liked the warped perspective from using the ultra-wide lens.

When shooting JPG with Fujifilm cameras, I’ve found that you need to turn noise reduction way down because it tends to eat fine details.