GFX Blue Hour

Reading the forums, plenty of people were lamenting the fact that medium format photography exaggerates the flaws in your photography technique.  Plenty suggesting that street photography was a no no! But I went the other way. Since acquiring the GFX 50R, 90% of my shooting had been handheld in the streets.

There were a couple of occasions where the tripod was used - the shoot at KLCC and Masjid Jamek to be exact. But the great majority of the time, I treated the beast just like my other setup, just point and click. 

Of course on occasions the snaps may be soft with movement artefacts from unsteady hands. But in the middle of the day, things were pretty straightforward. As long as I can get shutter speeds fast than 1/125 sec, I am pretty happy with what I had most of the time.

So, I took the GFX on a couple of occasions during blue hour and by taking things slowly, I managed to get decent shots. The relatively small size of the camera helped a lot I was sure. So was bumping up the ISO, accepting some degree of graining and noise. 

The main challenge I have at the moment was sorting out my technique when taking photos indoors. I don’t really fancy using a strobe system - never been good at that. Forums pointed out how good the GFX system were at still life and portrait of course, but doing those tend to take a lot of setup and effort. 

I am going to stick to what I normally do, and slowly expand first into low-light tripod-based photography, snapping landmarks around KL. So, plenty of things to explore in the coming months ...

A New Tune

I had been contemplating going up onto medium format for quite some time. There were plenty of contenders, and the couple main ones at the moment were the Pentax 645Z and the Hasselblad X1D. They were not cheap certainly. But the one I was anticipating would be the Fuji GFX 50S. All 3 uses almost similar sensors, about 1.7 times bigger than my current full-frame gears.

The famous Tokyo Street inside Pavilion KL

Bright neon sign

Not too scary

A quick walk outside

Further down past the fountain 

But they were going to be big and heavy. And I mainly like street work. And I have fast glasses to cover 28, 35, 50 and 85mm, not to mention standard and wide-angle zooms.

In the last few months, I had been mainly doing wide-angle walks. I decided to use a 85mm 1.4 rig yesterday. The overcast weather made the decision easy. And I was able to snap both indoors and evening outdoors without much hassle.

Looking in

Tokyo Street

Nice lanterns

Always under construction. When will it ever be completed?

That famous fountain at night

They were pretty strict down there

After looking at the results, it made me think about whether it would be worth the effort, cost and hassle of upgrading and abandoning the system I built over the years to accommodate this new endeavour. Bearing in mind, I was not planning of getting any monetary return from all this.

So, as it stood at the moment I might venture into medium format in the future. The question was not if, but onto which system. Apart from the Hasselblad, I don’t think the other medium format setup had the upper hand to my current kit. When I do go medium format, I would expect the results to blow me away, similar to when I was first able to use a Leica properly and appreciate what a sharp lens really meant.

Nicely arranged

Losing out to Uber I suspect

Across the road, Starhill Gallery

In clear bold letters

Just call them sweat pants ....

I remember the advise from one of my mentor, that when you go into the field I am in - a Haemato-Oncologist, you would need an escape. For me it had always been photography since my student years. Guess, I would need to up my game now ….