Switching to Fuji From Nikon Full Frame

[Music] I've been using the Fuji x-series cameras for a little bit over two years now and one of the questions that I get loads in my email is about switching from full-frame Nikon to Fuji and it's also a common that peer deliveries in my last review of the Fuji x2 2 and 2 years after I first published a blog about switching from from a Nikon to fuji it's probably still one of the most popularly read blogs on my website so I figured that it was about time that I made a video about why I switch from full-frame Nikon to Fuji [Music] number landscape interim photographer reshoot digit off about eleven years my first camera was a Nikon d80 and right since the very beginning I've loved shooting landscapes I've loved shooting water scopes I'm lucky enough to travel a lot whatever I shoot I'm lucky enough to be able to do this for a living and workshops and shoot professionally select a lot photographers I moved up from crop sizes up to full frame my first full frame camera with a Nikon d3 back then I used to shoot a lot of weddings professionally as well so I really appreciated the speed and then I moved up to a Nikon d800 which is a beautiful camera I won't say a bad word about Nikon cameras often photo they're quite being heavy but they make beautiful images and some of my favorite images and I've ever taken with the Nikon d800e it's a wonderful wonderful camera so what I don't want to do is be particularly critical of a camera brand or say this camera's not as good as that camera or this camera's better because that's not what it's about everyone makes great cameras nowadays there aren't really many bad cameras if you're making a bad camera you probably go out of business we are so looking up photography to be blessed with such a choice of incredible image making machines so it's not about this being better than that what it's about is finding a particular camera or finding a camera brand that works really well for you that you really enjoy using because there's always an emotional element about it and also something that fits the needs that you have in your particular shooting style so for me personally that's the Fuji x-series and what I want to talk about is why that camera brand and why that particular camera the xt-1 makes you to work so well for me and what I do [Music] the first time I came into contact with the Fuji x-series cameras was when I was using Nikon and running Street workshops and a couple of clients have came along with XT or on X Pro one and I started to notice these cameras in areas to have incredibly first of all they're beautiful machines but I was not too impressed by how tactile they were the usability I liked the fact that you could control everything through DARS on the top it was something that just looked really great and sort of piqued my curiosity to the point where I invested in an x2 10 because I thought it might make a nice backup camera or a travel camera to take with me when I was traveling no it said before watch over quite a lot which means take your cameras and lenses on planes and tripods and stuff like that and I also hiked a lot I do a lot of long tracks this kind of thing with the camera on my back and really I was just getting a little bit tired of the Nikon gear because it's a very kept me a very heavy kit now I'd scaled down from a d3 with with a 70 to 200 F 2.8 of smaller 200 and the f4 lenses but I still find that quite heavy that was still bulky so the idea of moving to a smaller system was something that intrigued me but I wasn't really ready to just pull the bullet and switch from one system to another just like that so what I did was I took the Fuji system with me on a three-week trip to Indonesia and by the time that I got back I shot landscapes I'd shot people and I hadn't missed the nikon camera at all there were certain shots there like this to our star trail which was dumb over next to one that I thought that I simply wouldn't be able to achieve with a Fuji camera and when I could do that kind of stuff it made me realize that I quite simply didn't need a big full-frame camera anymore and on top of that is the fact that I genuinely appreciate it came around a much smaller much lighter camera system so just how important is it to a smaller lighter system well I tended to travel light anyway I only ever really used to use two lenses I'm not sure why not even with the Nikon I was using the 1635 before before that it was a 17 to 35 F 2.8 and I used the 70 to 200 telephoto at f/4 before that using the F 2.8 version so when I switched the food you eat in my I got basically like for like replayed on it so she's in the 10 to 24 after one angle and the 55 to 200 telephoto I figured if a telephoto there's a fifty to one forty millimeter but it's an F 2.8 lens so it's big and heavy so it's pretty much the same as a full frame lens and what I wanted to do was travel as light as possible and just in the Fuji body the two lenses are receiving about one kilogram principle reason behind that is is while there's not a huge amount of difference with bodies certainly if you're using Sony the Sony mirrorless bodies are also quite lighter but when you're using full-frame there's obviously are gonna be a lot more glass in there so the big difference is always in the lenses and of course the more stuff you carry the bigger the difference in weight is so if you need to take an extra body but back up body in case one fails if you want to take your speciality lens to shoot stars or you want to take a couple of really fast portrait lenses then the difference gets bigger and bigger and bigger and there's also secondary payoffs with the weight difference is using a smaller camera means you can use a smaller lighter tripod it means you can use a smaller lighter camera back so the knock-on effects are actually quite significant I found that when I was traveling I was on average being music being about two-and-a-half to three kilos less with my camera equipment than I was when I was using for frame and that's a huge difference that's my tent my sleeping bag and most of my clothes that's three liters of water it's a big big difference and something that I really can't ignore and I'm not quite sure I could go back to shooting a big full-frame camera again a few months ago I got to buy the Fuji GFX which is a very good camera with really Lenz's as the lovely camera it takes fantastic images but by the time i finished using it but i was traveling i had it for about a week i was quite happy to give it back i'm just not really interested in using a camera that big that heavy again it makes a difference when you're hiking if you've got everything on your back it makes you more likely to go further to climb that peak to go up there because you're just simply left eyed it makes a difference when you're street trish and you've got everything slung over your shoulder in the back and you spend the entire day on the streets with the camera a couple lenses shooting just miss it you're less fatigued it means that you're sharp it means that you're more likely to see things more likely to be out on the street shooting and that for me is much more important than having a few more megapixels or having full frame but obviously this makes no sense unless the image quality is because there's no point of having a lighter camera if the image quality is going to suffer otherwise you just carry your phone what's the point in scaling down and being lighter and having a smaller kids having a smaller backpack if the images are going to suck or if you're not going to be happy with the image quality so here's where we have to be really honest with ourselves about how many megapixels we actually need for the kind of photography that we're doing now if you're shooting billboards if you regularly need to print more than a meter wide if you often find yourself having to crop half of the image off because you just want to use a little bit in the middle that you've shot then probably you need a high megapixel camera something like the canon 5d or a new nikon d80 or or medium format but though is not my purposes for shooting the biggest prints are the other sell to clients about 50 or 60 centimeters wide and this print behind me that's the 50 centimeter print done with a 12 megapixel camera so most of the printing that i do ends up in magazines and you can easily put a double-page spread with a crop sensor camera now i showed this before in the last video but i'll show it again now this is a double page spread shot with a crop sensor nikon d90 it's a 12 megapixel camera you can see here this is a single full-page spread this is shot at a 16 megapixel fuji xt-1 and you can see here this is you spread a little bit across both pages and this is a 36 megapixel full-frame Nikon d800 now I guarantee you I promise you that when you look at the page you simply cannot see the difference between those three cameras there's not at all to the naked eye unless you're printing really bigger than their shirt printing billboards you're not going to notice the megapixel difference in real terms when you zoom in to a hundred percent on your screen you probably are you going to see that anything off but so much detail here but in reality how much do you need to do that it's something that's simply not necessary in most practical applications of photography and I don't spend my time shooting test sheets test shots things like that and measuring need of the resolution what I care about is that my friendís the prints the purpose that I need them for look good and for me the Fuji x-series was a really good sharp lens it's going to give me certainly the kind of image quality that I need for that kind of work now one of the things that I did when I first got my Fuji XT you want with a side-by-side comparison with the nikon d800 and the fuji xt one now I wasn't really interested in measuring absolute resolution or detail because that's not what's practical to my shooting what I wanted to see was it when I shot them in similar situations set up in the same way that I would shoot a landscape scene so they come on a tripod shooting at f/8 shutter release was how big a difference it was and was there a significant difference a significant difference can mean different things to different people and how what it means for me is that if the difference between the two camera systems was so noticeable that it was immediately apparent to me that this camera was not as good as this camera the image quality from one camera was not as good as the other that was what I was interested in but I was also interested in the level of detail that I was getting from the system now it's important to remember that detail is not always the same as a resolution resolution is how many pixels they are which interprets how big you can print it on how much you can crop into it it's not necessarily the same as detail because if you've got loads of megapixels but the lenses that you're using are not very good and they're not resolving that detail then you're not going to get all the detail that the camera is capable of resolving so what I wanted to see was the camera system that I was using with the lenses that I have how much detail that I was going to have and detail matters in every level of the image whether you're showing whether you're just showing it at 2,000 pixels wide for your website whether it's at 600 pixels wide for an Instagram post or whether it's 50 centimeters wide footprint you're going to notice the detail more than you notice the resolution okay so this is an image shot with a wide angle on the left you've got the Fuji shot with the 10 millimeter and then on the right you've got the Nikon shot with the sixty millimeter now they're both shot at f/8 little base ISO let's just zoom in a little bit to have a look at the absolute detail starting off first in the corners well zoom in a little bit more at 200% now now i've de-rezzed the Nikon to make the resolution the same because otherwise you'd get a difference inside but what I say and what I'm looking here at detailing is that when we look around like at this plant here or when we look down we go down to the bottom left corner to look at the sign well look here or over here at the cables well this is actually a little bit more detail in the fuji image so even if the knife one had more resolution if i hadn´t down rest it so that they are the same resolution to be able to make this comparison you'd probably still be seeing more detail in the fuji so if we move over to the to the bottom right of the image we can look at car number plates here now this is closer i would say that there's a very little difference although the lamp there does look a little bit more blurred on the nikon if we go up to the top look at writing on the back of this crane the fuji is probably not quite no it's not resolving as much dealer detail as a Nikon the Nikon the lettering looks a little bit clearer there its resolving more detail but if we get over to the top right again this is what I was talking about in terms of a significant difference this really no significant difference between the two images here the the amount of detail that's being resolved is exactly the same or to the point that there's no significant difference so if I were to print these images I could print the Nikon bigger because it has more resolution but on a print at about 50 or 60 centimeters I'm not really gonna see much difference at all I'm just looking at this a lamp here and on the Nikon it looks a little bit out of focus and it shouldn't be because she was at f/8 and the lunch far far enough away from the camera to for it to be sharp front to back but looking right in the center here looking in the detail and this Bend again I would say that the Fuji is really Fuji is resolving more detail than the Nikon okay so now I'm going to have a look at the telephoto on the left here you've got the Fuji 55 to 200 and on the right you've got the Nikon 70 to 200 f/4 now to get the focal length as as close as possible I had to zoom the Nikon a bit to about 86 millimeters which gives an icon a little bit of an advantage because generally lenses are not quite so shot at the either end of their of their focal length so the Fugees at the end of its focal length and I consumed in a little bit now if we look a little bit in the top-left corner I would say that the Fuji is resolving a little bit more detail but yeah there's not really much difference just going along the bottom into the center if we look at the cars here on the right side not much difference just looking at the stickers on the on the on the side of that air-conditioning unit and now if we look at the street signs and icons a little bit sharper there but I would say no real significant difference but the lettering is sharper on the Nikon Sony again on this door frame then if we go up to the top yeah not much difference at all there if we look at the trees this is where you can see the kind of worm effect of the smeary effect that you get with it well certainly you got with the 16 megapixel Fuji sensor there's not anything like as much detail in the Fuji as there is in the Nikon but remember this is zoomed in to 200 mega it to in 200% if we go down look at the cars hmm and the sign here nikons a little bit sharper but there's not really a huge amount in it again I would say there's no real significant difference now this is the other end of the telephoto and it seemed all the way in so again now the Fuji has an advantage because the Fuji is it about a hundred and thirty-five fear and the Nikon is at its maximum extension at 200 millimetres so the Fugees got an advantage because it's not at the end of it focal range so again Fuji on the left and icon on the right looking at these cars in the centre of the image not a huge amount of detail not he's right different sorry but I would say the Fuji is resolving a little bit more detail certainly in the end the paving stones in the stones and a pave looking at some of the shape and definition of the cars it looks to me like the future is resolving a little bit more detail now a little bit over to the left so we can have it have a look at the street light and these railings you can see that there the Fugees resolving considerably more detail there and around the around the cars it looks certainly looks like this the Fuji is sharper this kind of gets more extreme as we get into the corners a Nikon really does perform well and the border and the corner at all if we look at the difference in this street science it's it's really night and day that is what I would call a significant difference in sharpness the Fuji is bringing out a lot more detail if we go across to the bottom right again looking at the signs the numbers on the wall and the street name there is quite a lot more detail in the in the Fuji image and going up to the top right it's pretty much the same now remembering that that was with a 16 megapixel x2 one or the new Fuji camera is the X Pro to the XT to the XT 20 and the new X III have Fuji is 24 megapixel sensor now that's detail and resolution but there are other characteristics that are important in image quality principle among them for landscape shooters is dynamic range now the nikon d800 and probably the new da 15 I don't think anyone's reviewed it yet has incredible dynamic range depth of range between the darkest shadows and the brightest lights now a crop sensor and the Fuji x-series it simply doesn't have as good dynamic range but it brings it back again to that significant difference how often do I notice this how relevant is it for me to overcome all the advantages that I get from Fuji certainly the size and weight advantages and the future advantages that I'll talk about a little bit later generally if I'm shooting landscapes if I'm shooting on the coast if I'm shooting into a bright light I'm always going to shoot multiple exposures so I can blend them together or I'll use a graduated neutral density filter that was the case of the day hundred and it's still the case for the x-series in the two years have I been shooting landscapes with the Fuji x-series there's never been a situation where I've thought I wish I had more dynamic range here I simply can't get all the detail I want to I just shoot I just shoot multiple exposures but I was doing that with the Nikon anyway now another aspect of the cameras image quality is its high ISO capability again the Nikon d800 is fantastic and highlighting you do greatest are shots of it but so does the Fuji so far for when I've wanted to shoot Astro shots I've been really happy with the amount of detail that economy I've been very very happy with the level of noise in the shadows and certainly because I don't generally need to point up shooting stars it's very whether I need to go past I 3630 600 that's usually my absolute limit and the Fuji will handle that pretty much almost as well or without any significant noticeable difference to the Nikon now another thing that I get asked a lot about and it certainly needs addressing it's a kind of a smearing watercolor effect that you got from Fuji RAW files particularly when you important them into Adobe Lightroom and particularly with this 16 megapixel sensor in the xt-1 and the XT 10 and the X 2 in the X Pro 1 now I certainly didn't notice it when I looked at the foliage at 100% and compared it with a Nikon camera but because I don't shoot foliage that often in landscapes it was never a particular issue with me but even then with some of these images like this one where there's a lot of foliage it was never it was never something that I felt had a significant impact on the image or reduce the quality in any way so I was quite happy to live with it now with the XT - that doesn't seem to be a problem I don't know if that's because fugitives change your sensor or if adobe lightroom have improved the way that they read fuji RAW files but i have to say it's not something that i noticed with the new camera but it's being honest that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not there generally with photography as in all things we have a capacity to ignore things that we don't want to see or alternatively we see things and amplify things that we do want to see so if you kind of decided that you hate this for watercolor effects if you look for it and you see it you're going to notice it and it's going to be a problem for you however perhaps guilty of this if you already love the fuji camera system if you if you're happy with the image quality you're probably quite capable of overlooking them or overlooking issues like that or I'm not seeing it or I'm telling yourself that it's not there what's a reality it's very hard because very few people judge with completely objective eyes but what that means to me is that the issue isn't something that's so significant that for the terms of my output and I'm repeating myself again for the purposes that I use the camera for the prints that I do I simply don't notice it and it's not a problem but you have to decide for yourself you have to look at the images and say can't live with this is this okay for me I certainly can it's not an issue it's not something I notice it's not something that I see in my images and I'm perfectly happy with the images that the Fuji has given me however if it is something that you find out this war off-putting you can always try using a different raw process unlike capture one or irritant developer which works particularly well with Fuji RAW files it's easier to fit irritant developer into your Lightroom workflow you just simply import the images into Lightroom and then you right click open image in here is a developer so the raw image will then open in irritant and that will give you your raw conversion and they you just save it back into library missus DNG relative and the raw raw conversion has been done elsewhere you'll get the best for conversion you came for a Fuji raw file it does that about 30 seconds to a minute on your on your workflow for each image and it's not something I genuinely find necessary yeah I suppose if I was shooting lots of furniture then I might use it a little bit more but it is an option that's there if you really feel the need to use it so looking at the image quality overall the Nikon does have more resolution but it doesn't necessarily have more detail with the lenses that I'm using it has slightly higher dynamic range and possibly slightly better highs near performance but is a different significant which brings me back to what I was saying before about a significant difference and how noticeable it is in the work and in the output that you've got quite simply for magazine prints for these kind of prints and I'm provided for clients there is no significant difference to my eyes now you may disagree with me and that's fine everything is subjective everyone has their own opinion and people tend to see things or not see things depending on a lot of their emotional preferences anyway but for me for this work that I'm doing I'm perfectly happy using a crop sensor 24 million pixel fuji certainly as happy as I was with a Nikon d800 so then we have to look at the advantage of using a mirrorless system now I've already talked a lot about size and weight which is a huge difference for me but one of the things that I really liked about Fuji was the way that they implemented all their features so things like the tilt of on the screen which at the time you didn't simply didn't have on the Nikon is something that I use a huge amount for landscape photography because I've quite often got a camera very close to the ground so being able to look down on the screen was a big deal for me now another thing that I love is the EVF I found that I much prefer using an EVF to an optical viewfinder it's brighter it shows me exactly what the expression of the image is going to look like before I click the shutter I've got the histogram on there I get immediate feedback when I changing the exposure compensation so it kind of does make you a little bit lazy because you know exactly what the image is going to look like before you even click the shutter and quite honestly I don't think I could go back to using an optical viewfinder now again that's a preference thing a lot of people prefer optical viewfinders and I get that but for me the EVF is so good and it's something that I do much prefer on mirrorless cameras now as I said before I like the tactile nature of the buttons I like having the ISO shutter speed exposure conversation on the top where I can see everything I like having the aperture on the lens it makes it a pleasure to use and that's something that it's really quite easy to overlook it's how much we enjoy using a camera so since I started using the Fuji I generally enjoy using it I enjoy taking pictures with it I used to find the Nikon it was an incredibly effective tool but it wasn't something that I enjoyed carrying if I was going to go out for a walk around the town if it's going for what my wife if it just came for sure height the idea of putting the big Nikon the with all the lenses in my bag was just something I thought I'm not gonna do I'm going to leave it home now maybe not supposed to think of it in that way the camera is a tool it's a solid object we're not supposed to have an emotional connection with it but it's also worth thinking about the camera is an extension of your arm it's an extension of your eyes an extension of your body so the way that you connected it when you're taking pictures is actually incredibly important and that's another thing that I've noticed when doing street photography when I was using the Nikon and the big lenses there's this huge black object in front of my face and it really separated me when I was traveling or know what was asking people if I could shoo environmental portraits if I could take pictures of them with the Fuji it's a lot smaller and it's a lot less kind of intrusive between me and the subject now for street photography it's also a lot more discrete I got a lot less attention on what I'm using this let me ever did with the Nikon it's not as noticeable it's a much smaller thing it's very easy to shoot from the chest of the articulating screen now it's much easy to capture candid and generally it's the kind of thing that when you're walking around the city people just don't notice as much they don't see it as much as they do a big DSLR with a big fat portrait lens on it no nothing it's quite important from a landscape point of view is how record the camera is now the Nikon is I had them for a long time I took them to the Sahara Desert I took them to the Amazon I use them in the Atacama Desert South America to Iceland to rainy Scotland and the Nikon cameras always functioned I never had a single problem with a nikon camera ever now haven't been using the Fuji for his life but so far I can say that they have always functioned perfect haven't been given any reason to doubt and I've used them in dusky volcanoes in Indonesia I've taken it again to a rainy snowy Iceland and next year I'll be taking it to Greenland and also to snowy Norway for the Northern Lights so far with the weather resistant lenses with the weather is this embody the night the Fugees have performed extremely well and I don't have any problem with them and I don't have any doubts about whether I can take you or I can use it in the ring where they gain weight it's gonna have any problem with it they are also incredibly rugged tough cameras so I think that's about everything all I can really say at the end of the day is that from a personal point of view that from a professional point of view haven't regretted switching to Fuji not for a single second I really love the image quality that I get from the Fuji cameras I love the feature set I greatly appreciate their huge savings in weight and the savings in it using a much smaller bag and i genuinely enjoy using the cameras which for me is a major part of photography but I appreciate that it's different for everybody and if there's something that you generally hate about the Fuji cameras or something that you love about the camera system that you're using now and that's fine stick with that but if you've got any curiosity if you're interested in switching to Fuji then don't hesitate drop me a comment and I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can or send me an email and I'll reply whenever I've got a minute but anyway as always thanks for watching I hope it's been useful and take care you

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 340,864

Rating: 4.8611817 out of 5

Keywords: fuji, fujifilm, x series, nikon, switching to fuji, moving to fuji, xt2, xt1

Id: 1cbc6qJoyCM

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2017