Anyone that knows me and knows my photography will know that I like to shoot wide open, the wider the better I just love Bokeh.
This was one of the reasons I bought Fujifilm’s 56mm F1.2 lens, the bokeh from this lens is beautiful. But as I’ve been moving forward with my photography I’ve started to shoot a lot at F8, shooting at F8 you lose the bokeh and the photos have a very different look and feel to them, as I said in a past blog I’ve been revisiting old photos and there have been a few where I wish I had taken the photo using F8 instead of shooting wide open.
The difficulty with changing my aperture is my style changes, so trying to making them look like my work isn’t easy, I want my photos to look like my photos. Here in lies the challenge, how to move from shooting wide open to shooting at F8 and keeping my style of photography. I think that the Fujifilm presets I use play a big part in this, as does the focal length I use. I have shot the 56mm at F8 and when using that lens at F8 the photos are nice and sharp, but for me, there is no point in having a lens that shoots at F1.2 and then choosing to shoot it at F8. Fujifilm's F2 lenses, 23mm, 35mm, 50mm, 90mm are built for using at F8, the lenses are perfect for the job.
Just sitting here writing this blog and I started to think about Fuji’s 18-55mm kit lens which is an amazing lens to use, maybe this would be perfect for shooting the scenes I’ve been shooting lately, hmm going to give this a lot of thought…..You see writing these blogs end up giving me great ideas.
Anyway back to the blog, I always thought that shooting at F8 was cheating, you know for photographers that couldn’t shoot wide open and maybe a part of me still thinks like that, but I’ve come to learn that we must do whatever we can do to get the shot and I have to remind myself that all that matters is the photo, it doesn’t matter how the photographer got it.
Along with using F8 I’ve started to use CH 11fps continuous, this really does help with capturing the perfect moment. I’ve started shooting shadows etc and the high continuous helps me capture a person in the perfect spot, I don’t use this feature all the time, but when I do it really helps me get the perfect photo. The funny thing is I really hate shooting at 11fps, the number of bloody photos I have to go through when I get home drives me nuts, so I try not to use it too much as I just don’t want to spend ages going through the damn photos, yes I know I’m lazy.
