Fuji X-Pro3 – 5 years on – Extended Thoughts and my Dream Lens

It’s almost exactly five years since I wrote the first of a three part (now four part) series about my adventures with the Fujifilm X-Pro3. At our five year anniversary the Fuji is back to being my main digital camera, and increasingly my main camera overall, as the current project I’m shooting is not using film. I moved away from the Fuji for a while when I bought a Nikon Df and the Df is currently the camera I favour for people shots, but increasingly the X-Pro3 is the camera I would take with me on a trip and the one with which I am making my work.

I bought it on pre-order when the camera was first released late in 2019. Back then I was using digital alongside film, shooting a Nikon F2 with a prism finder, and the form factor of both was pretty much the same. I’ve read over that old stuff and I think that nothing that I said there I violently disagree with. But I’m shooting differently these days. It’s pretty obvious to say it, but so much of whether or not a camera is right depends on your use case, and my waxing and waning with this camera over the past five years has really depended much more on my shooting style at the time than anything to do with the camera itself.

The Cliff Notes version of where I currently sit with the X-Pro3 is probably as follows. I use it as my dedicated landscape and travel camera, but at home I do not use it for people. For that I use my Nikon Df with a couple of AFD auto focus primes. If I’m travelling with just one camera and one lens it would be the X-Pro3 and the Voigtlander 27 mm F2. (More on this; what I call the “dream lens”, below.) If I took an extra lens it would be the Fuji 35mm f2 WR, which is great for people and subjects that move.

I think the best way of explaining all this is to take the example of a recent trip. I was hoping to make some of my landscape work on this trip and I did. On the other hand I did not want to take much gear and the Fuji and one lens was all I took. I’ll talk about how I used it and why the XP3 was so good for this.

Part 1: The Voigtlander 27mm f2.

To my way of thinking this lens on an X-Pro3 is really something special and quite unique. It’s a manual focus chipped lens that communicates with the camera so all the information is recorded in EXIF. The focus distance is passed through to the camera so the frame lines in the OVF adjust with distance. The focus patch is always in the right place blah blah blah.

Of course with the XP3 you can just flick it to EVF if you want to, but if you want to look through an optical viewfinder and have a manual focus lens that is pretty much a perfect focal length to fill the viewfinder then this thing fits the bill. In fact I’d go as far as saying that it really is nothing else out there like this combo. The Voigtlander does not talk to the older X-Pros, so the XP3 is the only OVF camera that does this.

Is this setup a sort of Robo-M-Leica Frankencam? I don’t know. I’m not a Leica guy so it’s silly for me to conjecture, but certainly I can’t think of anything that really does the same thing as this does. I might be copping out to talk about the Voigtlander in the following terms, but here goes. Yep, I think it’s great. It’s small, it’s nice to focus and it focusses really close. The aperture clicks are nice. Optical quality? It’s good enough. The original Fuji 27mm F2.8 was a great bang-for-your-buck lens when it came out before the prices got crazy, but when mine started making funny noises I did not want to replace it. Oddly I never really enjoyed the results from it. They’re just too clinical and I know that’s a silly thing to say but it’s still true for me. The stuff out of that lens just bites you in the face a bit whereas the Voigtlander is nice… the cheap TT and 7 Artisans lenses I tried annoyed me somewhat with their faults and the Voigtander just seems to be a good middle ground. It’s nice and sharp but it just seems more friendly in its image making. There – a whole lot of subjective bullshit, but it works for me.

Oh – and the size. To me the XP3 is quite a different beast with a bigger lens than this pancake. Even the 35mm f2 that I have seems just a little bit too big. It changes the whole dynamic of putting the camera in a bag. I think it’s a significant difference and really I don’t want to go any bigger than the Voigtlander. With a bigger lens, I feel like I might as well take my Df and an AFD prime.

Part 2: In Use – on Holidays.

Of course I always take a camera on holidays. Even when I have the intention of not making any work and not thinking about photography. You never know do you? And I guess this pretty much sums up how I am using the X-Pro3 these days. One camera, one lens, packed in a little pouch. And on this particular trip I did a few different types of photography so I thought it would be instructive to see how the camera adjusted to the different situations I used it in.

Hello Daido!

We were in Brisbane recently and I had hoped to make some coastal pictures but Brisbane is not quite on the coast and so I would wander around during the day thinking about something else to do. On one day I decided to take myself out of my comfort zone and pretend I was Daido Moriyama. I’m really no good at black-and-white and I don’t do street photography, so this day I thought I would set myself the task of making a couple of competent images in this unfamiliar genre.

Here I used the flip down screen to shoot from waste height to be less conspicuous. Sometimes I put the camera down on the bench next to me and shot it through the app. So yes, the app is useful and yes, the flip down screen is useful. That’s what I took from this little exercise.

Better Call Saul.

The next day I decided to play Saul Leiter and popped the Velvia simulation on and wandered around. I got sick of this pretty quickly and I didn’t really do anything much but nevertheless, it’s instructive to see that the camera was well up to the task. I guess here would be the time to say that I have gone from only using the RAW cards as a backup to now shooting mostly RAW. What I used to do was shoot JPEG to card two and RAW to card one and use card one as a backup. Every now and again I would dump all the RAWs from card one onto my hard drive just in case I needed them later. I have actually found this useful on a couple of occasions when I’ve wanted to fill out a series with some photos that I had deleted from my LR Catalogue.

Up in the mountains.

I don’t normally think about landscapes over the mountains these days but on this one particular day the sky came in nicely and so I thought I would see if I could construct a landscape. I’ve been doing this thing with overlapping multiple exposures inside a film camera for a couple of years and I thought as an exercise I would just give it a go digitally so back after I shot this I put them into Lightroom on my laptop and then assembled them in Photoshop. While this image in itself is not useful, the technique proved to me that I could perhaps use it later on which in fact I did do on a later trip to the coast. So the point is, I guess, to make sure your travel compact has image quality sufficient to make exhibition work if you get lucky. Make sure you’ve got a decent camera with you in case inspiration strikes, and the X-Pro3 is decent enough for my needs.

Down on the coast.

I have been making a series of coastal seascapes and while this was not a photographic holiday, it was a bit of a novelty for me to be on a coast that faces east. Where I live most of the coast faces west. Here I wandered around at sunrise and the sunset with my neutral density filter handy in case the light was too bright. I used the ND to get exposures of roughly 1 to 10 seconds which was what I was after for this effect. I guess a good thing about using the Fuji is that when you are using the optical viewfinder it does not blackout during a long exposure so that makes it easier to hold the camera level and roughly keep the horizon in the same place during an exposure. Sometimes I go up to 30 seconds… That is something that I think is pretty unique with this combination. I can set my aperture and see what the exposure is on aperture priority and then change aperture to juggle exposure time. I don’t have to worry about  losing infinity focus like an auto focus lens that might hunt for focus – especially when it’s dark. And focus-by-wire I never quite trust when it’s too dark to see the image. It’s of course very hard to see the camera settings when it’s pitch black but you can read them in the EVF or in the overlay of the OVF. There’s always a bit of a problem balancing brightness but I can’t think of the camera that would do it better than the Fuji. Another thing that the Fuji has is the ability to change to a low light overlay in EVF and menus where the readings go from white to orange so the contrast is less glaring and it’s easier to see both the scene and the readings. These days I tend to leave it on this low light setting because it’s a bit of a pain in the arse to change it backwards and forwards. One thing you can’t do with this lens is manually adjust the brightness of the OVF frame lines and they tend to be glaringly bright when you’re shooting in the dark.

Part 3: Sensor Sensibility.

At the time of writing I have emerged from a sensor rabbit hole. I’ve been trialing all kinds of sensors; classic Kodak and Fuji CCD, classic X Trans, Nikon D3 and D4 blah blah blah and I’ve now reach the conclusion that I’m happy with my current sensors and I don’t need to try any more for now. The X Trans 4 sensor in the Fuji is just fine. It’s worth mentioning though that I really don’t like it above ISO 800. In fact I prefer not to shoot it over 400. At 1600 it gets lumpy in a way that doesn’t look nice at full-on 100%. The look itself is not bad, it’s just that next to a shot at 400 there’s a very noticeable difference and because I’m needing to blow my images up so much if I’m shooting a series I can’t really use the high ISO shots. That doesn’t matter too much to me because to get exposures in the range 3 to 20s I will often be using an ND. As long as you keep the ISO around the 300 mark or less the sensor does great work at 30 seconds without long exposure noise and the 26 megapixel resolution is nice.

I used to think that 16MP was my sweet spot but I am preparing some work for exhibition that will be printed one metre on the short edge and two metres on the long edge and for the type of work I’m doing this sensor is just fine. The RAW files are better than the JPEGs if you don’t mind doing the work on them. The extra information that the RAWs contain is makes them much nicer to play with Lightroom. There is noticeably more that you can pull out of them and I’m pretty much practised with that now, and with my current computers there’s no hassle playing with a 24 MB file so I’m pretty much just using my RAWs even though I’m still shooting JPEG to one card and RAW to the other. It’s quite handy editing work on the fly on the laptop while travelling and then finessing it back home. You can be away, work up a catalogue and then import that catalogue into your regular Lightroom which is what I do. I’m pretty hopeless at Photoshop and all I use that for is layer combinations for my overlapping multiple exposures. I do all the curves and the graduated masks in LR, but I guess I could transfer those skills across to Photoshop if I found I really had to.

Part 4: Where now Fuji?

I guess you can tell I’m happy with this camera. I do like to keep one eye on the future though, and I don’t quite know where Fuji is headed, and whether I’m along for the ride. I’ve had a Fuji APSC digital since I bought the first copy of the original X100 to hit my town in 2011. I got it by chance  because I walked into the camera shop on the right day. It was $A1200. I pre-ordered the X-Pro3 for $A2400 on release and got it two weeks later. I got a used X-E1 used essentially free because it came with the kit zoom I wanted for less than normal used price of the zoom. Now the X100VI lists for $A2800 but people here wait for months. “Mint” used X-Pro3s now sell for round the $A3K mark. And XE-1s are around $A500. So if I was serious about getting in to a new system from scratch I really don’t know if I could take Fuji seriously. I don’t know what I’d do if I broke or lost my X-Pro3 and I hope it doesn’t happen.

I suppose I’m saying I just don’t really know what’s going on with Fuji and I don’t know how that affects me. At this point I don’t feel I need the Fuji 40 megapixel APSC sensor. I can’t buy an X-E4 anywhere which would make a good backup for the XP3 so I’m a bit stuck. I’m currently borrowing a GFX 50 from a friend on long term test, and I haven’t got started with that yet but I certainly don’t want those huge honking GFX lenses so I’m just shooting a Nikon F Mount pancake on it and it seems silly to have all that sensor behind that glass. I still own my X-E2  and that would work in a pinch, and could even make a really nice little travel combo with the Voigtlander lens, but I must say that having the EXIF info is so nice that I would seriously consider getting an X-E4 (which talks to the lens) if only they didn’t cost way more used than they did new. It just seems like things are in a bit of a muddle at the moment. Fuji hasn’t told us what’s coming out when and even if we knew that we wouldn’t know if they’d be available to buy even if they do get made. Oh well – it’s not really a problem but things just don’t feel like they did back when there was the logical progression in the X-Pro series and the X-Es and the X-Ts all seemed to be marching forward and making sense.

Well, we’ll find out I guess. Certainly I seem to have found my happy place with the X-Pro3 and I feel it’s a really good fit for the type of travel and landscape work I see myself doing over the short to medium term. I like an interchangeable lens camera – particularly for the long term, because I have become confident wet-cleaning a sensor and sensor dust behind a fixed lens would drive me nuts. I really need an EVF, and the OVF is icing on the cake so I think this is where I’ll be for a while. I’m surprised that it’s already been five years, as the camera still feels fresh to me.  I hope this article has been interesting and thank you for reading!

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