Our lenses!
here are our lenses!! ummm
if anyone has any old lenses or fujinon lenses or adapters and wants to give them to us can you contact us 🥺 looking for m39 and fd to x adapters and and fujinon xc 15-45mm, or any other zoom lens! also reallly want xf 35 1.4 but but long term. also xc 50-230. also interestsed in one of the portrait primes!
to do
- make background all cute and cardboardy and colourufl pastel like yoshi game we play
- stickers :) yume kawaii
lenses are usually categorised by their focal length (how far they can see and their field of view), and how wide they can open up, measured as a fraction (it's called aperutre). smaller numbers, like f1.8, are very wide open, and bigger numbers, like f16, are wayyyy smaller.
lenses also have the connector bit in their name usually.
part of why we put our thoughts about our lenses on our website is because we want other people to know about them and try to learn about them, in addition as self documentation of our feelings, for our own fun! if there's something specific you want to know about a lens that we don't put here, send us a message (email is on homepage) and we'll try and test it or tell you our thoughts about it.
ef 50mm f1.8
this is a single focal length prime lens!!! it's really cute sized and our favourite looking lens that we have.
what we like
- it is low light
it's autofocus mechanism is kinda annoying. it's slower than our kit lens at autofocusing, and less accurate, and also we can turn the autofocus ring even when it's set to autofocus, which we think is bad for it.
a lot of the time the lens seems to get incorrect autofocus, which is annoying. we did some portraits for something important and autofocus just completely missed the mark and always focused on ears and neck despite the focus point being on the nose and eyes
it;s pretty clear when this lens is out of focus when it's really wide open because of the chromatic abberation. something kinda cool is that the colour of the chromatic abberation changes depending on which direction your missed focus in. i think purple is when you missed focus backward, and green is when its forward. i dont think we've seen this in any of our other lenses although most of our lenses hardly even have chromatic abberation.
the whole very wide open thing and the lens missing autofocus is very annoying because its extremely hard to use intentionally and when we do want something in focus it's like, extremely unreliable. this honestly may not super be the lens' fault, hoenstly. dslrs have seperate autofocus sensors from the main sensor and so the autofocus they deem as correct could actually be correct but only for the autofocus sensors and not the main picture taking sensor.
this thing is SO loud when it gets stopped down (which happens when doing dof preview or when using liveview exposure preview). bitch has THINGS TO SAY and im so happy for them that they're able to get it out.
tamron adaptall 200mm
- max aperture f3.5
- model name ct-200 (your welcome~)
- full frame equivalent 320mm (canon eos), 300mm (fuji)
- year 1976
- mount tamron adaptall-1 (ours has a adaptall to nikon f adapter)
- weight 520g
this lens works like a super telephoto lens on our camera, and also, it's so much fun
super telephoto makes us view photography completely differently, and it's pretty exciting.
this is definitely one of our favourite lenses to walk around with, just because it makes everything look completely different. it's fun and deeply inspiring
it's pretty difficult to focus with this lens (at least on canon eos), because the optical viewfinder is bad for focusing and the lcd forces us to hold the camera+lens in a very unstable way, making it jitter a lot. using digital zoom makes it even worse! and because it's a 200mm lens, it has very little in focus at once! the lens itself is very soft so even when something is definitely in focus, it still doesn't really look in focus, you know?? on our cellphone and camera screen they look okay, and then when we look at them on the computer screen it's imediately clear how blurry it is, even when fully zoomed out. it's a little disapointing, since it looked fine on the small screens!
the lens is also pretty low contrast, although this is something we actually like, and when we want more contrast in pictures, we can tell camera to use higher contrast or we can edit them on computer. the pictures we're showing here are edited to have way more contrast 💝 😘
it's very heavy!!! sitting around neck is tiring sometimes and we usually support just the lens with our hand when moving around.
f3.5 max aperture is closer to f5.6 on our cameras. canon eos has pretty bad iso performance and so we usually tried using lower shutter speeds although with long and heavy lenses this is really hard to do without unintentionally moving during picture. even if we did want to take high iso photos, we reached close to max iso before actually getting scene bright enough.
also, it's really nice having exif data! wish canon eos let us set that for adapted lenses. for at least focal length but also preset apertture one
our nikon-ef adapter got stuck to this lens lol
ef-s 18-55mm f3.5-f5.6
dont have this lens anymore.
it has optical image stabilisation and holy shit OIS is fucking broken that shit rocks oh my god
everything should have ois i swear to god. or even digital stabilisation if its programmed well, at least in video.
we like that its zoom and focus are entirely analog; on a lot of lenses its done electronically. because of the way the lens works, it actually starts getting longer when zoomed below around 35mm, probably closer to 40mm. 55 and 18mm are when the lens is longest! this is probably because dslrs and wide angle lenses dont get along very well. you see, the lens by default is around 40mm away from the image sensor when you put it on the camera, so anything below that just will not focus correctly and not look right. as a result, lenses shorter than 40mm on canon eos have to get bigger instead of smaller, in order to correct it and make it look right.
at least i think 😊 🐈️ uwu
this lens is incredibly boring and honestly that's fine i think it's probably good to have like a zoom lens that fills a lot of purposes.
we accidentally managed to get (???) coconut oil onto the front element which was an incredibly easy way to add a low resolution bloom filter to certain parts of the image slkjgfhdskjfhg. we tried to wipe it off but instead of getting wiped off it just got WIPED AROUND. this made the actual effect way less distinguished which made it usable but it also still seemed to lower resolution of the lens in a way that was WAY less cool than when it was in small blotches and concentrated.
also ours felt like the um, zoom ring would get loose and that was very bad for our ocd cuz we constantly kept checking the zoom ring to make sure it wasnt broke and oh my god i hate ocd so much i hate it so much it sucks fuck rituals i hate them they just make us so anxious and stressed for no reason and doing them fixes nothing
for some reason the lens cap also never seemed to sit perfeclty on without some force/adjustment. like this didnt change anything it still stayed on and blocked light but it was annoying and sometimes also made getting the cap on and off surprsingly difficult`
this lens has really fast auto focus and it's pretty quiet too.
tt artisan 27mm pancake lens f2.8
what we like
- it is small
- it is light
- it flares and vignettes
- it has aperture ring
- it feels cool
babey pancake autofocus lens for our dolly camera 🐈️
it's our only metal lens and omg it feels so much more difference from our other lenses. or maybe well tamron also metal but i dont know still feels really solid
it has a tiny screw on lens hood that we didn't actually know was there cuz it was pretty tight on ours and also lens cap works on it. i think it looks a lot cooler with the cap turned off but having it on makes us less scared of touching front glass.
🐈🐈️️️ 🌸d,olly
f2.8 maximum aperture is a little annoying at night time and also its very basic and doesn't do very special. we also don't think we like how it renders out of focus detail or fine detail but we're not sure and it could just be aliasing and demosaicing from camera and low resolution.
sometimes 27mm feels like its both too far zoomed in but also too far zoomed out maybe very middle ground lens. as its only fuji lens its annoying for limitation
autofocus is really inconsistent on foliage and lots of things that are far away from camera. wonder if maybe camera is letting us photograph before lens moves into positon? maybe its just getting wrong focus. without another lens we dont know if its camera or the lens. dolly that wears pajamas and is sleepy and always carrying softfriends :)
some of what the others wrote before but without the yucky parts
🐈⬇️
it could just be that the camera mount on fuji is much more solid than ef mount or that having a metal lens mount makes a difference but it feels so satisfyingly solid to put on and off the camera. it's awesome
it feels so much more solid than any other lens we've ever had, it's cool.
when this lens is wide open it has a lot of optical vignetting. we like vignetting!! it makes using the viewfinder kinda annoying sometimes cuz it can give us a mood that we dont like. there might be a way to have it so that it uses a smaller aperture for composing and then maybe going to max aperture when taking picture~ i think camera does opposite of this when focusing
it's cool how it does actually respect our aperture settings for the most part, unless shutter speed is in auto. ef 50mm would only have the same aperture as our setting when we click depth of field preview button or when taking a picture. we can stop down to f6.4 to reduce most signficant vignetting and actually see it happen!
this lens seems to have really strong flaring which looks so cool. it autofocuses pretty quikcly
manual focus by wire is kinda weird. we like it overall we think more than analog manual focus (at least on modern lenses) and allows us to have different focusing speeds and precision on one lens. but we also like having physical end point to indicate when we cant focus anymore in that direction. currently, we're listening to when the lens focus motor stops making sound when we spin the focus ring to find the furthest and closest focus.
dont really like rendering
this lens is noticeably wider than our 50mm lens and we like using it for a specific kind of medium distance portraits a lot. we think that, for the most part, this lens is good lens primarily because of its size and and having a really middling focal length, which makes it kinda flexible, but it doesn't really excel at most things.
but it turns out, we actually really like using 27mm for a very specific kind of portraits! we like framing something in its entirety to cover most of the image and then centre it. we like having some negative space.
becauxe this lens regularly misses focus and it being very hard to tell on the screen, we've started using this lens in manual focus mode more, and using back button autofocus, so that it doesnt refocus for every shutter half press, so that once we get correct autofocus, it doesn't shift again and defocus itself. we've also stopped using the lens hood, which we mostly used for making it harder to touch the front glass. not having the lens hood makes the lens look signficantly cooler and signficantly smaller.
sigma 150mm macro
we don't have this lens but we've gotten to use it !
macro is very autism and i think this sometimes feels a little too long im not sure.
focusing is really smooth and espeically manual focus feels very cool.
because of the weight of the lens and its focal length we found it pretty difficult to use for macro some times. it was very hard to keep a consistent framing, and oftentime it felt too long! macros are still very autistic however.
we don't really like how abrupt the transition between in focus and out of focus is, since it's a macro lens very little is in focus at a time and the transition being so abrupt makes getting one picture without focus stacking look strange.
i think if we get our own macro lens we'd want it to be closer to 100mm, and probably also would want it to be stablisised!
this lens feels very cool to use and we also used it for portraits a little bit. but we didn't really like how much 150mm flattens face details, so we switched to using our 50mm and 27mm and were pretty happy with that. 50mm a lot of the time feels just right !
fuji 50-230mm
- max aperture f4.5-6.7
- model name fujinon xc 50-230mm f4.5-6.7 ois
- full frame equivalent 75-345mm
- mount fuji x
- weight 375g
Finding information on lenses we're interested in getting has turned out to be pretty difficult. we like writing this page to help others think. Very hard to find pages about how someone uses a certain lens they have and what purpose it fills for them, especially ones like this. this lens is well renowned especially offline, but finding people talking about it online is difficult.
iso2000 (to bring brightness high enough)
this lens is what we always wanted from interchangeable lens camera system. high image quality lens that goes from ~70mm equivalent to ~360mm equivalent. this is our favourite focal length range, and having it in one lens is very awesome! this is the second dedicated fujifilm lens we got, and we got it because of the focal length, and also because someone said they would pay half the price of it for us if we agreed to take bird pictures with the lens. (lens was 220cad, and we each payed half of that). originally, we were planning to hunt for a standard fuji zoom lens on auction for around 100 cad, even though it was incredibly boring to us. we think we are much happier that we got this as our second lens, instead of the standard zoom. (the standrd zoom goes from like ~23mm equivalent to ~70mm equivalent)
what we really like about telephoto lenses is how they work when you line up a bunch of objects. distance is compressed and it gives a very cool look. we also like using them for photos where we have a subject! we also use it when we are in a wide open area and when taking pictures of things far away. we mostly use it at 50-70mm, which is our absoute favourite focal range, but frequently use it at 100-150mm when we have a specific shot in mind (usually photoing down a street) . 230mm is mostly reserved for challenging ourselves creatively, macro photos, and birds and other small distance things. :3
this lens specifically has a few special characteristics. it is autofocus and has optical image stabilisation (the other telephoto lenses we considered realisitically possible to afford had neither of these). the stabilisation helps a load compared to our tamron 200mm lens, even though the max aperture is much smaller meaning longer shutter speeds (at best, the 50-230 lets in less than half as much light as the tamron, but it gets worse as it zooms in). stabilisation once again makes video look like magic relatively, but it is more jumpy and harder to control compared to canon kit lens stabilisation. the size of the lens also makes it more difficult to get it stable already.
at 230mm its also pretty good at macro, at least outside. inside, you need to get a 1-2 metres away from subject to get it in focus, which is hard to come by indoors. indoors also has way less light than outdoors, and the aperture is so small at 230mm and the lens is so big at 230mm that the image stabilisation struggles a lot, meaning lots of blurry pictures.
in general this lens is hard to use at night time, we can make it work, but there are just points where we've had enough and switch to a much wider prime.
113mm, f5.7, 1/250s,
iso6400
although, given that the majority of our photography occurs at or near night time, we do end up making it work sometimes when we just really really want that focal length. It's our big favourite !!
50mm, 1/2s handheld, f4.5, iso6400
we've had this lens for a while and we've taken a lot of awesome pictures with it. it's also fun when we climb to top of a building or a mountain to use in order to isolate subjects!
sometimes we also use this lens for portaits, althoughg generally we prefer less compression in portraits. it makes things look softer and more playful and rounder and bouncier to us.
we really really love this focal length and looking for example pictures is making us so excited!! there are so many amazing ones~~ but its overwhelming! and we should probbaly put these on a sorted gallery page or go into our telephoto examples page to show off how overlapping subjects with compression looks cool in long focal lenghts.
we also want to show more examples at 50-70mm, which is the majority of our photos with this lens, its just theyre generally more boring and dont push the lens' capabilities as much. less exciting!!
we usually use this lens with mechanical shutter, since its so much easier to get rolling shutter cuz of how long and big the lens is. on 27mm,, we usually use electronic shutter, because that lens has shutter shock from the mechanical shutter. also, the 50-230 has basically silent autofocus, and nothign visibly moves when focusing either, which is.. fucked up. we thought it was broken when we first got it and couldnt hear or see or feel anything doing anything! and the actual focus changes are extremely smooth and gentle.
at long focal lengths this lens takes a long time to autofocus and usually doesn't get correct focus if its very out of focus. it will give up about halfway through, and give focus confirmation to somehting hilariously out of focus. usually autofocusing again fixes it. this makes photographing fast birds a challenge. also, bird photographing is extremely fun. it gave us the same fast paced and energetic fun that running around downtown toronto with our canon kit lens gave us, or when chasing the o train.
the lens caps on this thing fucking suck they are horrendous. this is by far our largest lens which makes brushing it against things really easy. the lens caps will just slide off if you do this. what the fuck. also its size makes it a little unweildy to carry around, and only within a month of owning it we'ves scratched the otherwise flawless glass twice, purely from taking it in and out of bags, when we assumed the caps were on (they weren't! they fell off from bag rustling!~).
we also are especially scared of using this lens in the rain, since its much harder to keep it under an umbrella or in a plastic bag, and because of its poor handling, its difficult to keep control of, meaning its easy to get way too much water on it, or maybe bump it the wrong way.
fuji 35mm f2
this is quickly becoming our most used camera lens.
we got this because, we used the xf version in a shop, and loved using it. this is the xc version, which is less expensive, but doesnt have as cool a design or an aperture ring. we'd really like the xf version, but its really hard to justify when we could use that money for another lens instead. a big part of why we liked it was its aesthetic and aperture ring, so maybe we'll get it one day.
looking online we thought we'd only want a f1.4 35mm lens, because those have extremely wide apertures which creates an awesome effect usually exclusive to telephoto lenses. using it in the shop though we realisd how much the f2 version fulfilled what we wanted, it was essentially a perfect lens for us, and it became imedaitely apparent how much we wanted it. to a lesser extent, we also felt this way for sigma 18-50mm f2.8 (notably none of the fujinon zooms though), and fuji 60mm f2.4 macro (and the fuji 50 f2 slightly), which we've also used in a shop, but those lenses are much more expensive.
so uh, yeah, if anyone wants to get us a lens or let us borrow theirs, we'd love if it was one of them :pleading
:3
what we really like about this lens is how wide it opens up to, f2, the focal length, and how smooth it operates. we have ocd suffering about breaking our camera stuff, so a large part of us wants to get the xf version of this lens because maybe it'll last longer.
when we first got this lens we assumed it would just become our replacement to our 27mm. its basically just the same lens but with much better light gathering (even at f3.2 the 35mm gets brighter pictures than the 27mm at 2.8! ) and a focal length we like better. we also really like subject isolation possible with this lens thanks to signficantly larger aperture and slightly longer focal length. the 35mm is a signficantly better all around lens than our 27mm, for how we like photographing.
but, we actually have noticed the way we use these lenses are very different!!
35mm is default lens much better than 27mm default lens. better focal length and way better light gathering (which makes it very very flexible) and way better macro capabilities and way better focus isolation and and this lens has by far the fastest and most accurate autofocus we've ever used and it also is sharper i think. Its a good lens. but 35mm lens works much better for subject photography, where we have a specfic idea. we've started viewing 27mm as a wide angle landscape lens, where nothign in particular is the subject. we generally dont find this lens ideal for landscape style stuff like this but it is much better at it and it does make us think differently which is good.
fuji 18-55
this lens has really pretty lens flares. probably our favourite
viltrox 56mm f1.4
love this lens, its a fast fifty on apsc.
not only is this our favourite focal length for just about anything, but it also has a really fast aperture
it has no where near as much cool characteristics as our ef 50mm f1.8 from the 90s but it still has a bit of them. It still has chromatic aberration but its reduced to the extent of not being relevant. CA on the ef 50mm was legitmately annoying in portraits cuz it would muddy up and colour tint fine details and getting rid of it would ruin any similarly coloured clohting.
whenever we only take out one lens with us, it is usually this one, sometimes to a fault. it can do just about anything and is great fun while you do it too.
if we were wager to guess, this is our lens with the highest optical resolution we have ever had. which means something. its kinda heavy and long and has a bad aesthetic design especially compared to the fuijcron 50mm which we so badly wanted to get instead cuz its just so pretty looking on the camera and so much smaller and feels so good to use.
other than its physical design size and weight, the thing we dislike most about this lens is probably its mad flaring. It has very little of that cool flare. we've basically sinched the entirety of its cool factor out in one photo, most of the time its annoying and just introduces very difficult to deal with colour shifts and contrast loss.
its the only lens we have a lens hood for, which is meant to stop flaring, but it isnt actually long enough to stop flaring in lots of situations, so we need to bring our hand out to act as a hood extension. The hood also scares us; it's made of metal, which isn't good at absorbing vibrations. We're scared that, if we drop it, the metal hood will carry the impact vibrations to the lens body and will shatter the glass inside it. with a plastic hood, the weakest point is the hood, and the plastic will crumple or shatter or bounce instead, which is a much better outcome. we know people who have had this lens, brand new, dropped it the first time they went out with it, it landed on the hood, and then it broke the lens.
putting the lens hood on (especially reversing it) makes the lens look cooler imo.
lenses we've tried out
fuji xf 50mm f1
yup
honestly, the only reason we've tried this lens is to show our partner how large lenses get, and how funny this one is
hoenstly, we were kinda hoping it would be more interesting when we used it
for pure bokeh stuff (what the lens is meant for id say) the actual lens diamter is only 4mm larger than Fuji's 56mm f1.2, and only 10mm larger than the 56mm f1.4s out there, so the depth of field the 50 f1 makes isnt all that unfammilar. its really only interesting from the perspective of it being noticeably wider angle than 56mm and still producing that shallow depth of field look.
it is very big for a fuji lens, and also has shit autofocus. we were really surprised with how bad, inaccurate, and slow its autofocus was, was also not providing much over the other (much much smaller) lenses in this focal length and aperture range. like, we had assumed that there must be something to this lens, right? it kinda feels like fuji made it just cuz they could??
also we've seen online that isnt optically spectacular and its vignetting in particular probably makes it less effective in low light than f1 impliesfuji xf 50mm f2
yup
i think its very funny how this lens is like the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the 50 f1. while occupying the same focal length and branding!!
this lens is tiny, incredibly practical and versatile, essentially perfectly designed for its goals, very pretty looking, eee
we so so badly wanted an excuse to get this silver 50mm fujicron. we were looking at the fujinon 60mm f2.4, the sigma and viltrox 56mm f1.4s, and this lens. the only things this lens had going for itself was that we fucking loved its physical design, from its aesthetic to its function, leagues ahead of all the other lenses. we still desperately want to get this lens just because of how cute and pretty and fun it is for us to spin that aperture wheel around.
especially since we probably wont have a reason to get any of the other fujicrons.
we absolutely love the 50mm f2. amazing lens, we think its perfect at what it sets out to do/
this lens also has really good minimum focus distance and we started tellign ourselves we wouldnt need macro lens if we had it (for the kind of thigns we need macro for, this lens woudl have done a pretty good job)
ultimately though we decided to go with 56 f1.4 cuz we decided the extra stop of light would be more flexible, and we are happy with this decision.
sigma 56mm f1.4
wow ! so tiny! had sily autofocus that we didnt like, and nothing about it made us gravitiate to it! also too expensive for us to afford! (could afford a used 50 f2 and used viltrox 56mm f1.4)
fuji xf 60mm f2.4 macro
we love how quirky this lens is. we loved the whining sound it makes when autofocusing, and how its focus changes depending on aperture. we love how close this lens can get for focusing!! photos we've taken with it look so cool
i think it ight have identical aperture to 50 f2??? not sure. they have, from our tests, exactly the same bokeh characteristics, and they do both end up being 25mm in diameter. like? thats so cool right??? like they are the exact same opitcally except 60mm is more zoomed in and the physical lens doesn't tapier in towards the front element and is a little longer.
we also really appreciate a recessed front element cuz we're clumsy
this is such a cool lens
we decided not to get it because we think getting a faster f1.4 lens was a much more flexible idea, especially since we could just get macro filters for our exitsing lenses. ALso, 60mm felt slightly difficult to compose with, and would be challenging for us, and we decided having flexibility to crop in was worth it for more comfort.
something that we always forget about this lens is how expensive it is, we regularly see it for hundreds more than the 50mm f2, and i think thats bizarre. i think for most people, the 50mm f2 is a better lens, and the 60mm is also incredibly old (it literally tied for first lens fuji made for x mount). we only seriously considered it cuz we found one with somewhat wonky autofocus and one bashed up for a really good price.
unlike the 50mm f2, we no longer yearn for the 60mm macro, now that we've chosen what lens in this focal lenght to get. i think thats interesting.
sigma 18-50mm f2.8
really like this lens! its kinda incredible how good it is. unfortunately, its a new lens, and a well known very high quality lens, so i cant afford it used.
we really love how close the lens focuses and having f2.8 at the long end is really awesome. these two things work really really well together.
its also shockingly small for a f2.8 constant lens!! and has really good optical quality. i think it looks too silly though, and it also gave us sensory triggers, because the texture on the lens made us squirm when touching.
fuji xf 33mm f1.4
honestly blown away by this lens i still have no idea how it is so good
everything people say abou tthis lnes online is true it is just that good and i have no idea why
fuji xf 30mm macro
true macro unlike the 60mm and the things you can do with that are realyl cool and we had fun finding things to get ultra close ups with with the 30mm. think we just dont like non telephot macros so we werent all that interested in it
fuji xf 80mm macro
this lens is probably our favourite macro focal length and also has image stabilisation, so we thought we'd love it
it is really big though and really expensive. this lens pushed us away really badly just because of these things alone