I’ve tried using the Fuji XE-1 in the studio before, as most of what I do takes place in the studio. My preferred lens in the studio is usually a 70-200 or a nifty fifty. My issue with the XE-1 was that it struggled to focus in a dim studio. The modelling lights on strobes are often switched off ( if you are using gels, you kind of have to or you will melt the gels ), or at best are quite dim. In the end I wound up using manual focus as otherwise the 55-200 lens I was using would just hunt for ages before picking up focus.
There are quite a few times in a shoot where I want the model to “flow pose”, so I will take a picture every second or so for 30 seconds and he/she will just go nuts pulling various poses. This didn’t work at all with the Xe-1 and autofocus. I also felt the camera was a bit sluggish in general when trying to do something like this. Manual focus was ok so it wasn’t a show stopper but I was keen to see how the XE-2 would fare in my dimly lit studio environments.
So over the past couple of weeks I’ve competed 4 studio shoots with the XE-2. It has been a huge improvement, so much so that I’ve rarely felt the need to reach for the D800. The 55-200 is almost too sharp when shooting at F11 in decent light.
The improved EVF and general speed of the camera also make it much more of a pleasure to use in the studio. The only reason now I would use the D800 is to get a different look to the photos, it’s a very subtle thing, but the slightly softer images of the D800 sometimes appeal more to me, especially for portraits ( I’m not talking 1980s soft glam here though!).
Moving off at a slight tangent, the new burst speed is pretty awesome and doesn’t lock the camera up the way it does on the XE-1. I went out to photograph a charity motorbike ride at the weekend and used the burst mode extensively. It worked great ( although the autofocus was not fast enough in this situation, I was taking shots of motorbikes moving at speed through small gaps in the crowd, its the only situation recently where I absolutely needed a DSLR to get the shots ).
The wireless mode for me is totally pointless as it stands, its much quicker for me to pop one SD card out, stick it in the laptop to auto import into Lightroom, then put a spare SD card in and carry on shooting. 2 minutes later I’ll have all the photos sitting on my laptop. If they improve the functionality of the wireless feature it could become useful.
Battery life seems really really good. At the motorbike event I took 1500 shots on burst mode and the battery was still on 2 bars. In all the studio shoots I’ve done, I’ve not once had to change a battery. An average studio shoot is 800 shots over 4-5 hours for me, so between 2 cameras thats 400+ each without needing a battery change ( I normally have the 55-200 on the XE-2 and the 35mm 1.4 on the XE-1, the reason being I find the 55-200 a lot faster on the XE-2 whereas the 35mm 1.4 is very decent on both cameras and I don’t notice the difference so much ).
The button layout is much nicer, I like the way they have positioned the AF button, now that I’m used to it, its very fast and intuitive. One thing to watch out for when you first start shooting in a studio, turn off the Preview Exp in manual mode setting ( under screen setup, which you access from the menu button while in image preview mode ). In natural light situations this is really useful, as it gives you a good idea how the image will look when you change the iso/shutter speed/aperture. In a studio, as soon as you go above f4, you will just see a black screen. The camera can’t tell that your about to fire off a strobe to light the scene, so it will just play it as it sees it, and in general, if you take a shot at f11, 1/125 and ISO 100 in a studio, you will get a black screen unless your using studio lighting to add some light. This will be blindingly obvious to most studio shooters, but the menu setting to turn this feature off is a little hard to access, so I hope this helps someone!
Here are some more shots from the studio shoots over the past week. The XE-2 performed like a champ with strobes, natural light and continuous light. In fact, when using the continuous lighting it was notable for getting the white balance much better than the D800, which had a very strong colour cast (easy to correct afterwards, but with the fuji it got it right in camera ).
