To further test the capabilities of the Pergear 12mm f2 and collect more sample photos for the upcoming review, I took this little guy out for some night street HDR shooting with a tripod here 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 ), but this Pergear lens does have some nice sun star effects which could make it a bit more interesting to use 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.
To color these, I threw some of my presets on top of the JPG effect the camera created based on Classic Chrome with a warmer WB shift. 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.
For some of these shots, I also used the Transform tool to straighten things out. 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 you kind of need to turn noise reduction way down because it tends to eat fine details.
Pergear 12mm f2 HDR Samples | Fukuoka Japan
