FujiFilm GFX100s Medium Format Long Exposure Review and VLOG in NYC | w/ GF80mm 1.7 & GF100-200mm

the gfx100s is such an incredible camera that i couldn't resist but to make a second review the gfx100 shoots 100 megapixels is a 16-bit camera and has ibis all in one small form factor body that can easily handle street photography as well as studio fujifilm north america was awesome enough to send me the gfx100s along with the 80 millimeter 1.7 and the 100 to 200 millimeter 5.6 lenses to test out the 80 millimeter 1.7 came out earlier this year in 2021 and is the fastest lens in the gfx lineup with the 1.7 aperture the 100 to 200 millimeter lens is the widest zoom range on the gfx system my personal favorite focal length is about 200 millimeters so i'm pretty excited to see how this lens performs for this review we're going to focus on the gfx100s and i'm going to show you some long exposure photography some car light painting examples studio headshots and of course new york city street photography we'll also talk about the pros and cons for each of these lenses but mainly focus on the killer detail of these 100 megapixel images i'll also show a few comparisons between the 80 and the 110 millimeter lenses last time fuji sent me some gear i tested out the 110 and we'll do a bit of a battle of the bokeh if you will i'll have another video coming out talking specifically about these two lenses and my experience with them over these three weeks as well in the future so let me know if you have any questions or comments below i love having conversations with you guys so please feel free to ask anything if you enjoy these videos definitely consider subscribing i'm gonna continue reviewing more equipment um another idea i had was potentially bringing you guys through a photo shoot from start to finish with the setup and the lighting to editing the files let me know if you think if you'd be interested in watching that video and with that let's get into the review so in my last review of the gfx100s i showed many examples of street photography in various areas around new york city and some studio shots as well in this review we'll primarily focus on long exposure shots to see how this camera performs first we travel to dumbo which is on the top west area of brooklyn new york if this was my first night testing out the long exposure on this camera and it also happened to be the day before september 11th so you will see the memorial lights i started out on the promenade i took a few shots there and then i ended up moving down towards the waterfront i found this to be a better view for the majority of the shots you'll see throughout this entire video i'm using the 80 millimeter 1.7 one kind of unpleasant surprise with this camera that i found out pretty quick in doing a multi-second exposure is the processing time i've never experienced this on any camera before but as you'll see if i took a 25 second exposure the photo would need to process for the same amount of time so for example if you took a 10 second exposure shot right after it finishes the camera will need to process for another 10 seconds before you can do anything or take another picture this is the same in 25 seconds 40 seconds a minute etc it's a bit disappointing but hey this is medium format we're talking about quality not speed since the 80 millimeter is quite narrow i was really only left with one option multi-shot panel to achieve this first i compose my framing with just holding the camera and once i have the composition i like i set up the tripod once set then i do a horizontal pan just to make sure the scene is level and of course that it will still work nice in a panel for this shot specifically i took four shots in a row to mainly do the water and the buildings and then i adjusted the camera up a bit to do another four shots to make sure i had enough of sky i take each shot manually to make sure that there is no mistake with auto focus and the most important thing you can do after each shot is taken is to check the focus as it'll basically be impossible to line up the shot perfectly if you move the camera and check the photos after you're done taking all of the shots you need as you'll see throughout each scene i take you through there really is a lot of waiting around it does add a ton of time with the processing let alone doing you know a multi-shot pano with each exposure being around 30 seconds but as you can see the results are absolutely insane let's open up this final jpeg in photoshop and pixel peep a bit so we have this image open in photoshop um this is just the jpeg um and let's take a look at the camera specs so like i mentioned this was eight shots merged into one pano each shot was a 25 second exposure at f9 um using the 80 millimeter like i mentioned so for this panel specifically um and no other panels we're going to talk about throughout the rest of the video i stitched this together in a program called pt gui and the reason for this is that lightroom just was not liking the sky um it would not merge all the photos together and i also don't think it's about resolution because uh the next panel or one of the next panels we're gonna look at um was nine photos stitched together so i'm a bit perplexed but either way my workflow for this panel was a little bit different and i think it caused a bit of degradation in the final file it's still massive it still looks great but we're not going to hardcore pixel beep this so yeah i mean overall this looks pretty insane um if we zoom in we can really get a very large punch in um [Music] i don't have my navigator open um it doesn't really say the size that you're zoomed in but i mean the detail here is pretty insane and it's very sharp um if we zoom in on the memorial lights you'll see uh light light marks from the uh the birds that flew into said light um but yeah i think the quality here is pretty insane um if we zoom in on the bridge this is this is super impressive i mean you can basically see every single wire on the bridge um [Music] you know you have a pretty extreme level of uh clarity in the dynamic range from the shadows and highlights i am pretty new to doing long exposure shots um so i can't really speak to nailing things like the highlights and whatnot like this is obviously a bit blown out and so are these areas um and some other panels we're gonna look at it's not as bad but like a building like this for example this is literally all light so you know literally every every area of it is made up of lights so i don't know if it would be possible to to get that properly exposed perhaps i'd have to take like a um just a single shot and merge that also one other note with this edit specifically i really wasn't able to kind of balance the mid tones as much as i wanted to basically when you do your stitching in pt gui and you import that into lightroom it will not load the camera profiles or the camera and the lens profiles rather and you basically cannot apply you know the fuji color profiles and whatnot so i felt it felt a little bit weird editing this because i didn't really have like my usual full control but yeah i think for all the others um that's not the case but also one last note this um the screen that i was recording doing the screen capture on is not 4k so it is gonna be upscaled but that's also just a testament to the quality um it is a bit a bit better than what you're looking at but it's also not too bad so yeah let's take a look at the next one so next we walked across the brooklyn bridge and made our way over to an area manhattan by south street seaport which is called two bridges this is the area in which you are between the two bridges the manhattan and the brooklyn bridge so for this shot it wasn't as tall as the last one so i was able to just take one row of panos and stitch them together afterwards and basically i wanted to do long exposures for some time especially after the last time i tested out this camera and in thinking about it just my biggest fear was the uneven sky when stitching them together because you know as you know clouds move really fast um the sky can change as well due to atmosphere and whatnot so i found that like i kind of got into before lightroom really doesn't do a great job when stitching together the sky but it really does do a great job with buildings and structures and whatnot even with the water it doesn't do the best job so just something to consider if you wanted to try this out i would i would consider trying out a program like pt gui because there was really minimal issues with the last panel so i have this one open in photoshop as well each shot was about 25 second exposure this aperture was at 5.6 basically um yeah the preview i took a much took a few more extra shots than i showed the final file as just because i wasn't sure where i wanted to end the pano on the right side but yeah if we zoom in um same sort of quality as the last one naturally the uh the detail in this camera is pretty insane like i was mentioning um for this pano i had to revise the sky a decent amount because it just simply lightroom didn't stitch it well but yeah pretty insane this image is basically at 240 resolution um this image is about 15 feet wide and 40 15 feet by four so that's pretty insane i think one day i have to really test out printing these super massive yeah even if we zoom in on like other parts of the image that were pretty secondary grains are decently sharp we're zoomed in pretty far at this point pretty far beyond like what's reasonable so from where we were in the last location i just walked along the waterfront a bit further down and snapped this picture i thought the welcome sign was pretty cool so yeah with this one open in photoshop um we can just zoom in take a look at the detail the um this isn't a bracket shot it's just one shot not a pano as well but yeah you can see the welcome sign despite being extremely bright we basically have all the detail there and yeah we zoom in the the building is super sharp i think the craziest thing um my craziest find in zooming in on all 100 megapixels probably if we zoom in on this uh this corner of this building looks like there's some person just hanging out in the top of the building with their arms but yeah pretty neat the panel or the 911 shot right here where this guy was standing that's pretty funny [Music] i think the neat thing um about this camera is the thing about this camera is the dynamic range so you have dark and light parts of the this image right so over here is clearly a very light area and then as you move over here more residential not as much going on um it's clearly a darker point in the image but if we zoom in the quality is still pretty uh the dynamic range really is handled very well with this camera you know it's a little bit sharper on the lighter side but overall very impressive another night we headed to roosevelt island a narrow island between upper side of manhattan and astoria queens to get here you can take the f train right onto the island or you can take the roosevelt island tram which is a much more fun option so we did that it's always really cool seeing manhattan from high up and when you take this route you get some really cool vanishing point shots my main reason to go here was to take a photo from the park at the bottom of the island you get a really nice view looking down manhattan but surprise the park apparently closes at 7pm and we got there too late but it's okay the island still has a bunch of great views to capture and after getting off the train the first spot we found was right under the ed koch queensborough bridge and if you guessed that that shot would be a pano you would also be correct i was able to pull off this shot with just two photos a top and a bottom and i found that that gives a pretty neat perspective for my x series i have the 8 to 16 millimeter lens and i would really love to have an ultra wide lens for the gfx um i definitely think that this is a neat shot that i'm about to show you but if it had substantially more to the left and the right that'd be pretty interesting i think also for pretty much the majority of the shots here i could have avoided doing a crazy amount of paddling if i had a wider lens so for this shot we just did a 15 second exposure at f 5.6 i really liked seeing all the detail in the bridge and for shooting at just 5.6 literally the whole image from top to bottom is insanely sharp like you know you get things like trees and stuff that move in the wind they're obviously going to be a bit have some motion blur to them but it's just insanely impressive how literally the entire image is sharp this is definitely a medium format thing and probably one of the biggest reasons to get a medium format camera for that specific look also if we zoom in on the buildings this is clearly wasn't the focal point the main focus but the building is super sharp even the building all the way in the back pretty sharp a little bit a little soft but um also in doing long exposure um it's i i think it makes elements like the water be much more smooth and pleasing but you also get some like hidden light trails in the back that you wouldn't necessarily see for the first you know the first thing that you look at the image because there's really not a visible highway um well there is but you can't really see any cars because we did a 15 second exposure also if we zoom in we can see uh these the tram lines are super crisp see some cameras in the bridge what's really cool and also really challenging at the same time is long exposure shots they make everything really bright like this almost looks like a daytime shot and the challenge is picking which elements to you know deep dark which elements to adjust that was a big learning curve for me in doing all this long exposure so after the bridge shot we made our way towards the park which we found to be closed and in walking towards the queen side of the island we passed the smallpox memorial hospital which was a hospital to treat people with smallpox it closed in 1950 and is currently abandoned in a pretty dilapidated state i wanted to take a shot through the fence but i really didn't have a wide enough lens so we kept on moving once we got to the queen side we basically ended up shooting towards long island city which features a massive pepsi sign i think it's something like 49 feet tall by 150 feet wide or something along those lines so like the the shot with the two bridges i shot this in portrait orientation i was able to accomplish this shot with about three photos so yeah with this three shot panel each shot was a 50 second exposure i wanted to fool around with doubling the exposure pretty much and seeing what sort of effect we would get so the water is definitely smoother than the like a 15 or 25 shot pano i think it's a bit more pleasing of a look but it does come with a bit of a challenge because this was shot right by the water so it was a little bit more breezy i did have to retake i think two of these panels be due to just a soft image but yeah if we zoom in we could see that the image is very sharp kind of like if you if you zoom in like here it's kind of like overwhelming um overwhelmingly sharp with detail but um yeah we zoom in on this massive neon pepsi sign but we can see that all the quality is there it's not completely blown out and i think if i edited this slightly different you'd even have even more quality um even more detail rather but i think my favorite spot in this image would be this section here um just kind of it's not what you see when you notice it but then when you do notice it it's pretty neat um i also think you have like this is for for an area of the image where it's not a main part i think this is substantially farther back i mean this is pretty sharp um yeah i think i forget i think this is f11 so uh you know we got edge to edge sharpness at f 5.6 so i'm not really surprised that when at f11 um even sharper but i think also one of the biggest challenges for doing long exposure is nailing the like i was kind of saying in the first shot um nailing the the color balance so when you do these long exposures everything the mid tones tend to be very yellow so it's definitely a fine balance of bringing those down and properly color grading but i'm pretty happy with this shot we didn't have to go too far to get the next shot it was a pretty nice view of the ed koch queensborough bridge pretty much exactly where the tripod was already set up um but yeah i would love to come back here with a wider lens there's tons of great spots and basically the bottom like middle of the island is really a grassy area and there's a pretty great juxtaposition between the skyscrapers and the grassy hill if you compose it properly i just didn't really feel like doing another panel for the most part this night was pretty calm it wasn't too windy and like i mentioned earlier it's just extremely crucial when doing long exposures that you check each image after the shot is complete zooming in as far as you can in the camera preview just to make sure that the camera wasn't moved by the wind or anything so with this next shot of the bridge this is a prime example of one of the best effects you get from doing long exposure photography you just get this hyper illuminated effect that is kind of unlife-like but really nice so i really gotta start moving through this otherwise it's gonna be a 30 minute video but as you can see this is a another 50 second exposure um i think this was just a one and done shot and basically it's uh really sharp as you'd expect [Music] um you get a really nice level of dynamic range in the shadows and highlights and all that and i really like the um the light trail that you can follow from the cars that goes the full length of the bridge i thought that was pretty neat outside the studio i'm more of a run and gun photographer i very rarely bring around a tripod and this is kind of why i wanted to focus on long exposure for the review to kind of challenge myself to do something new i also really like the pain of a heavy bag but seriously coming from the x series where i would carry around three lenses and never really feel like my bag was heavy my bag was really heavy during these shoots i had the gfx the 80 the 100 to 200 uh tripod bottle of water um my bag was really heavy and i was i really not wanted to complain about the weight so anyway i wanted to do some daytime long exposure and in order to do this i needed to pick up an nd filter so i grabbed the tent stop i headed the times square and i wasn't really sure what i wanted to capture here but i heard they had a ferris wheel so i just kind of made my way towards that i set up my tripod i took a few shots and as you'll see my edit here was a bit more stylized than most of the other photos i'm showing you here the scene was kind of a bit boring and flat so i wanted to make it a bit more interesting so cruising along with this both these shots were 15 second exposures at f 16 and this was with the 10 stop nd it's just super bright during the day and one of the coolest things like i've been talking about how you know the wind can move your tripod and all that and doing long exposures but so if we zoom in i mean this is super sharp and and what's really fascinating is that you know this structure is holding up this giant wheel is turning but clearly it doesn't move much because it's super sharp but yeah i really thought the effect of the the ferris wheel moving was really cool i really don't see too much daytime long exposure it's not as interesting for the most part but i thought this was a pretty uh pretty cool effect and if we zoom in on the buildings in the back naturally they are super sharp um if we go to the second photo [Music] um same sort of thing this uh this outer rim actually it looks like crazy sharp over here but building's really sharp in the back um you get this really wild effect here um i thought that this was pretty neat shot i wish i definitely had a wider lens for this i would have loved to do a to get more of the ferris wheel in but i also don't mind this crop so i used to take the j train every day to my office when i lived in bushwick and without a doubt it was my favorite train to ride in new york city due to it being above ground it's just really cool to see the manhattan skyline when you're headed into the city and of course brooklyn in the opposite direction so the first stop in brooklyn is myrtle ave and it has a pretty sweet view as you can see here but this shot was super tricky and honestly a pretty lucky shot the platform is raised up in the air so it was really shaky and after about three shots i almost gave up but i gave it one more shot and the platform surprisingly kind of stayed still and i ended up nailing a 15 second exposure this is definitely one of my shots from the three weeks with this camera it's just absolutely crazy how vibrant this camera can handle color i think the 16 bit aspect of this camera is absolutely amazing so again this was a 15 second exposure and if we zoom in we could see some pretty substantial detail even further back i think i think there definitely was a bit of you know atmosphere uh distortion due to this being like a highway um so it is the bridge is a little soft and whatnot but i think um you know things like this building which is right in front pretty pretty sharp also the tracks you get some really nice color reflections in these tracks and i think the probably my favorite thing about this image is you just have a wide array of colors you know you have lighting on this building that's different you have lighting on the bridge is different this this building completely in shadows um some oddness reflected in this window um then you have this these tracks over here kind of a different temperature than over here this is a completely different color vibe as well i really enjoy this shop for all the uniqueness that it has and also pretty sharp for being on top of a subway platform on our way to the next destination i wanted to take a shot of the williamsburg bridge from the street level after we exited the platform it was a pretty quick walk to the intersection of bedford ave and broadway ironically this ended up being a bit of a frustrating shot as well that makes it two in a row so for this one i had to time the traffic light and do a max of 15 second exposure otherwise the shot would get ruined by light trails i don't mind some light trails especially going down the street but the issue is that the cars would turn from broadway and the result wasn't very great but nevertheless we got the shot and ended up being pretty cool i had a grand vision of getting this shot at sunset but timing wise it didn't end up working out this day also i forgot to mention i ended up using the 100 to 200 millimeter lens for this shot this was the first panel i used that lens for and i pretty much was almost zoomed in at 200 millimeters i think i was at 180 for this shot so since this is the first shot that we didn't use the 80 for um let's take a look at what we got so this is a little bit cropped i don't think it's too heavily cropped um as you can see there's definitely uh this you don't get the same edge to edge sharpness due to you know being at almost more than double the focal length you definitely have a you know a bit soft softer look on the cars which of course is cool don't mind that um but yeah you got some light trails in the back and the bridge is pretty sharp as sharp as we'd expect again there's traffic going over the bridge so emissions and temperature change may give it a bit of a soft look but pretty sharp overall you can obviously see every single cable on the bridge also right up to the top so this lens checks out as well we are at the final destination of that night and also we are at the end of the featured examples that i'm going to show so we are at domino park and this park used to house the domino sugar refinery hence the name this park's at the edge of williamsburg brooklyn and in my opinion it's one of the coolest parks in brooklyn it's super modern it has really amazing views of many bridges and of course has a new york city skyline so tonight we were racing the rain the entire time we hit two out of the three stops without any issues but as soon as i set up my tripod here it started to lightly rain fuji's weather sealing is truly amazing so i wasn't too worried about some light rain i did shoot a lamborghini in a blizzard with my xh1 but after i got this shot it really started to heavily rain so we had to pack it up i was able to get one pano and then wait for the rain to stop a bit and i went around shooting a bit more but ultimately we did get rained out but we did get enough shots to really call it a successful night so for this shot we ended up going with a 30 second exposure shot at f16 and basically if we zoom in uh we can see that everything's pretty sharp um as you can see it was really foggy so it's still pretty cool to see you get a decent level of detail even with the fog present um but yeah as we'd expect the bridge is pretty much edge to edge sharp even the building in the background decently sharp for how foggy it is this is also using the yep the 80 millimeter so pretty cool um yeah some of these buildings they just got completely demolished by the fog which is a really cool effect and you can see some of the uh like the light reflections in the fog water is pretty smooth this is only a two shot panel and uh yeah even the bridge is in the background so in the front you have the williamsburg bridge then you have the manhattan bridge right here and then you have the brooklyn bridge all over here all the way in the back it's pretty cool three bridges in one shot and that wraps up the featured examples as these additional shots cycle through i just wanted to discuss the lenses so for the majority of the content in this video as well as throughout the duration that i had the gear i pretty much only use the 80 millimeter the 80 was just easier to travel with and lighter but it also was a superior lens i found the 80 to be substantially sharper which isn't a surprise as it is a prime unlike the 110 millimeter though this lens does have a decent amount of chromatic aberration which for the most part it was only really noticeable when zooming in a very large amount so i wouldn't really say that it was a deal breaker this lens is decently small insanely sharp and has amazing bokeh i only had about three weeks experience with the 110 millimeter back in the spring i'd really need to have both at the same time and do a bit of comparisons to truly pick a winner one thing that could be a deal breaker for the 80 millimeter would be the speed this is a really slow lens the motor in this lens is definitely much slower than the 110 and the 110 is pretty slow to begin with the motor is also pretty loud so if you want a fast focusing lens in this sort of focal range i would highly recommend the 120 millimeter i found this lens to be insanely sharp and extremely fast i used this lens to photograph my dogs in the last review i did and this lens is an f4 so it's not really a fair comparison but if you aren't concerned with speed or noise i was very pleasantly surprised with the 80 and i would absolutely recommend it next up for the 100 to 200 millimeter i didn't end up using this lens as much as i thought i would as an aperture of 5.6 the background separation naturally isn't as extreme as the 1.7 it was definitely refreshing to have the ability to zoom on medium format this was really my first experience with the zoom lens on the gfx system and i didn't hate this lens at all my main complaint is that i felt 100 millimeters of zoom range wasn't really enough i would almost want a true equivalent to 70 to 200 millimeter at 2.8 to consider buying this lens for myself the only other obvious negative for this lens is that it's extremely large especially with the lens hood on it is massive and not discrete at all i wouldn't really feel extremely comfortable walking around with this lens all the time the 80 or the 110 millimeter lenses are pretty small and much more discreet if you can get away with just using a prime otherwise this lens is decently sharp not as sharp as the primes i've been talking about but it's also at a much lower price point and it gets the job done it also stands up to the gfx quality so that about wraps up the video as you may have guessed i recorded the intro before i sent back all the gear and of course edited the photos and scripted out this video so after doing that it kind of made more sense to focus on long exposure for this video since i had so much to talk about and kind of make a part two of this video where i go more in depth on the other types of photos i took so stay tuned for a part two of the part two hopefully coming next month november maybe early december for that video i will have some non-long exposure street photography some studio head shots and some light painting which will be pretty cool if you've made it this far thanks for following along let me know if you have any comments or questions below i'd also love to hear what was your favorite photo or scene from this video [Music] for the future i'm hoping to get my hands on a 23mm millimeter for the gf system and also maybe a 50s mark ii um and make a review video on that um or if you have any other types of lenses that you'd like me to get on the gf system let me know lastly i just want to thank fujifilm north america for sending me this gear to test out for a couple weeks uh shout out to dan uh also a big shout out to dom for helping me out with this audio situation i hope this audio sounds a bit clearer and with that i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Mike Banom

Views: 6,179

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Id: 31XMklU2qy4

Length: 36min 42sec (2202 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021