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New Fuji Lens for newborn

Started Jun 29, 2017 | Discussions thread
Pritzl Senior Member • Posts: 1,477
Re: New Fuji Lens for newborn

Another vote for the 35mmF2. Our son was born 2 weeks ago and I got that lens specifically for that reason. Here is the reasoning if you're interested:

  1. A fast prime is necessary to shoot in natural light with a fast enough shutter speed to avoid motion blur; anything slower than 1/100 might show it.
  2. Wider than 50mm equiv will distort features too much and/or include too much background - something that's likely to be very cluttered around a newborn.
  3. OIS is irrelevant at those shutter speeds and focal length.
  4. I tried a 50mm (80mm equiv on Canon 1.6 APSC) with our daughter and while the results were decent, I had to back up quite a bit for full body shots at which point it's hard to hold the child's gaze - it just wasn't as flexible.
  5. The much smaller size of this setup means the camera is always close at hand to capture fleeting moments.
  6. Why not the faster F1.4? I was more comfortable with the F2's faster focusing and that I could shoot at F2 without worrying about sharpness.

To my mind there is only one downside  to this lens for newborn photography: due to the wider angle of view, slightly longer than normal close focus distance and image quality deterioration at close focus it makes for very poor isolation when you want to shoot say just your baby's wrinkly little hand. Not sure I've identified the best lens for that in the Fuji lineup yet.

 Pritzl's gear list:Pritzl's gear list
Fujifilm X10 Canon EOS 70D Fujifilm X-T2 Canon EF 50mm F1.4 USM Tokina AT-X Pro 12-24mm f/4 DX II +9 more
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