Nikon AF-S 50mm/f1.4G on Fujifilm X-A1

I've received my Nikon G to Fujifilm FX lens adapter recently, and today I had a chance to give it a quick try with my Nikon AF-S 50mm/f1.4G on Fujifilm X-A1 when coming home from work near my favorite railway station. My short review here is about this particular combo. First of all I am quite happy with this setup.

Nikon 50mm/f1.4G on X-A1 with lens hood.

The camera: My daughter got a Fujifilm X-A1 camera as an award when she won a photography competition, and she gave me the camera as a gift; this way, I love this camera, of course. This is not an A7, definitely, but does her job nicely. First, I was shocked by the lack of EVF, and I found manual focusing on the LCD challenging; but, eventually, I found a big advantage of the LCD over an EVF: I wear glasses and I found the LCD not as precise, but much more convenient than an EVF. Maybe a dream camera for me would be one with a 5 inch, hi-resolution, fast LCD.

The lens: The Nikon 50mm/f1.4G is not small on the X-A1, but looks terrific and gives a semi-professional feel when I use it. Still, it is not that big to annoy/intimidate people on a street photography session. It is surprisingly easy to focus on the X-A1. I always keep the camera near the chest with the LCD tilted down, and I look downwards when focusing with focus peaking and magnification, keeping my arms firmly pressed to my body to stabilize the camera as much as possible; I never hold the camera with arms loose when manually focusing.

Nikon AF-S 50mm on X-A1 via an N/G-FX adapter.

The adapter: The N/G-FX adapter is surprisingly well built for the price and the aluminum aperture ring works smoothly. Unfortunately, setting the aperture value is pure guesswork with this adapter on G lens. The adapter works fine with a regular AI-S lens, too; just make sure the aperture ring on the adapter is turned to enable the stopping down on the lens.

Nikon AI-S 180mm/f2.8 on X-A1: brutal combo.

Here are some of my photos taken with the Nikon 50mm on the X-A1:

Here I used the lens wide-open. Manual focusing, of course, with focus peaking and in most cases with magnification. I kept and uploaded here the full pixel resolution of the images (after cropping) to view 1:1. These images cropped and somehow processed in Lightroom 5.4 (shadows, clarity, exposition, contrast, highlights)

Manual focusing is acceptable with the X-A1 for street photography for slow moving scenes.

The lady with the dog were quite far away, it can be guessed how far when calculating from the pixel-size of the image.

A full size image, I am quite happy with it. This kind of scene is terribly easy and fun to manually focus.

A was focusing to the lady on the left.

I think the X-A1 is a terrific (or, at least good enough) camera for (socio)street photography.

For the full set view http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/6567299074/albums/nikon-50mm-f1-4g-on-fujifilm-x-a1 Have fun, Miki