TTArtisan 50mm f2 Manual Focus on Fujifilm XE2S

I couldn’t have picked a cloudier day to try out this manual focus lens. In fact, this whole area is about to be battered by a typhoon tracking eastwards towards Australia, disturbing the atmosphere as it goes. These photos, taken on the Fujifilm XE2S, were shot in between an almighty squall hitting 50-odd knots. It just so happened that it was the one evening we’d gone ashore to spend a night at a little boutique hotel on Gili Gede called Ko-Ko-Mo.

Most of these images were taken back on the tiny island of Gili Asahan, where our boat Esper is moored. We’re hunkered down for a few months to wait for this weather to pass, so finding subject matter to photograph is a challenge. Using the TTArtisan 50mm to manual focus, however, is not. It is a joy to use. I don’t tend to do spec breakdowns here, concentrating more on the end-product, but I believe this lens is all-metal, with clear aperture and focus length markings embossed clearly. The focus ring is metric, which I find easier to calculate when scale focusing, although I have no problems with imperial.

Even at f2, focus is easy to nail, in part due to the XE2’s excellent view finder. It never ceases to amaze me how an eight year old camera can have a superior EVF to my more modern Sony cameras, but that’s one of the reasons for using Fujifilm. The above shot was taken at f2.

One thing I don’t get hung up on is corner sharpness and other technical aspects of a lens’ performance. I’m more likely to notice barrel distortion and maybe chromatic aberration, the latter being less of an issue when shooting black and white. You can tell me if there is sharpness fall-off at the corners, but I won’t care. The black and white photos, by the way, were taken in the Fujifilm Monochrome setting and I tended to leave them as-is, all bar the one above where I did pull some of the detail from the shadows. Otherwise, I kept my blacks black as the film simulation intended.

The real power of this lens, however, is going to be street photography. One, opening up that aperture to f2 to assist the poor low-light performance of the XE2S, and two, setting the aperture and focus to scale focus for some quick action. Unfortunately, my current location prohibits any kind of experiment with crowds of people because there aren’t any! All the action happens on the water.

The whole debate about Fujifilm bringing you closer to a film experience has been debated to death, but it is true. Not only the film simulations and the camera’s dials but now with a manual lens the whole experience has completely slowed down. And that’s what I love about using these older Fujifilm cameras.

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