Hello everyone!
So I finally sat down to write and posted my first blog post. It’s been three and a half years since I opened this website!
It must have been more than ten years since I took advantage of my lunch break to take pictures on the street with my camera. There was a time, almost every noon I took my Nikon D90 and walked around, taking pictures of this and that. But then, for various reasons, this hobby was gradually neglected for many years afterwards.
About three years ago, I have started to shoot more, since I got married and then welcomed two little angels one after another. I like to take pictures of my beloved ones, capturing everyday moments and special memories of the whole family.
Gradually, my passion for photography resurfaced strongly. In addition to photography, I began to learn more about cameras, lenses, and buy more equipment, and also wanted to maintain this hobby for a long time.
This afternoon, for the first time in more than a decade (!), I took my camera to the street to take pictures. The main reason is because two days ago, I bought the Metabones Nikon G to Fuji X Speed Booster mount adapter, I was so excited that I wanted to experiment more. The thing was that when I took out the camera to take less than a dozen photos, it started to rain, I had to end the shoot after only 5 minutes, and rush back to the company! Haizzz…
In addition to allowing Nikon’s F-mount lenses to be mounted on Fujifilm bodies, this Metabones mount also expands the lens’ field of view (by a factor of 0.71) and increases the lens aperture by 1 stop (1 stop brighter) – that’s why it’s named Speed Booster. This means that, even though I’m using a cropped body, I still get almost the same focal length as when I’m using it on a full frame body.
A specific example. Today I used a Nikon Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 Ai lens. If you only use a regular mount adapter, when installed on a Fujifilm X-T3, the focal length will be equivalent to 35 x 1.5 = 52.5mm in full frame. But thanks to Speed Booster, it compresses the image of the 35mm full frame lens onto the crop sensor, so that the field of view is expanded to the equivalent of a focal length of 35 x 0.71 = 24.85mm. But since it is a crop sensor, we will eventually have to multiply the focal length by the crop factor, so it is 24.85 x 1.5 = 37.275mm, which is very close to the original focal length of 35mm. If you do the math, the crop factor has decreased a lot, instead of 1.5, now it is only 37.275 / 35 = 1.065. Not to mention that although the maximum aperture of the lens is f/2, thanks to this mount increasing the amount of light reaching each pixel on the sensor, it ends up benefiting by 1 extra stop, equivalent to f/1.4. It’s really magical!
However, when using the Speed Booster mount (as well as other normal mount adapters), I can only focus manually (MF), not autofocus (AF). For me, this is not a problem. Recently, I have also bought quite a few MF lenses from Nikon. Being able to use these classic lenses on a Fujifilm crop camera body with a slightly narrowed field of view is amazing.
So how is the image quality, is it significantly reduced? That’s what I want to find out in this afternoon shoot. But since I only had time to shoot a little, I will have to come back to this in another blog post.
It’s lengthy enough. Please take a look at some of the photos I took today first. All of these are straight out of the Fujifilm X-T3, shot with the Nikon Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 Ai lens via the Metabones Speed Booster mount. The only thing I did was to reduce the image size to 2048px wide, without any other editing.
Today’s very first shot
Background is so blurred, partly because of the distance
Right after I took this shot, it started to rain
I quickly walked back to the office, but I couldn’t make it in time for the heavy rain, luckily I found shelter
See you in the next post.
An