Steveston Fish Market

Vancouver and the Fujinon XF 27mm

I ordered the Fujinon XF 27mm pancake lens at the beginning of April when Fuji was having their latest round of lens rebates. Unfortunately, the lens has been backordered since that time and I wasn't going to have it for our trip to Vancouver. Since I was hoping to use the XF 27mm in Vancouver as a general purpose, walkaround lens, I decided to rent one.

Having read numerous reviews, including this one at photozone, I knew that the XF 27mm was a well regarded lens amongst Fuji X users. Now having spent a week with it, I must admit that I too am quite impressed with this nifty little lens. In fact, the XF 27mm was on my X-T1 most of the time during our trip. I only switched to the XF 14mm or XF 35mm when I needed to go wider or wanted images with a more shallow depth of field. Essentially, I used the X-T1 and XF 27mm combination in the same way I normally use the X100S.

In all honesty, I didn't really miss the X100S (which my wife was using) during our trip. On a few occasions, I would've liked to have the built in ND filter on the X100S or to be able to shoot at f/2. But in general, the X-T1 and XF 27mm worked out very well as my light, general purpose, walkaround kit. To give you an idea of what I used the XF 27mm for, here are some of my favorite images shot with it from Vancouver. If you'd like to see more, check out the images in my Granville Island and Lynn Canyon Park posts, which were all shot using the X-T1 and XF 27mm.

Lynn Canyon Park

During my last trip to Vancouver, I visited Capilano Suspension Bridge Park. This time around, we decided to visit Lynn Canyon Park. While Lynn Canyon Park may not be as popular as Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, in my opinion, it is every bit as beautiful. There's a suspension bridge, a waterfall, a swimming hole, and several hiking trails. Entry and parking is also free which makes it an ideal place to spend an hour or an entire afternoon.

Granville Island

We spent a week in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada recently and one of the first places we went was Granville Island. This was my second trip to Vancouver and Granville Island was definitely a place I wanted to photograph. Since our trip took place during a heat wave, we spent most of our time wandering through the indoor public market. The eclectic shops and vibrant colors make the public market a fantastic place to eat, shop, and do a little street photography. Here are some of my favorite images from our time at Granville Island.

Lightroom Fujifilm Profiles vs VSCO Film 04

Back in April, Adobe released Lightroom 5.4 with color profiles for Fujifilm cameras. Up until that point, I had been using the VSCO Film presets as a starting point for editing most of my RAW files in Lightroom. Since the Lightroom update however, I find that I'm now using the Lightroom profiles more and more. To get a better idea of the actual difference between the two, I decided to do a comparison by editing some RAW files using both. Here are a set images I shot recently edited using the Lightroom Velvia profile and the VSCO Film 04 Velvia 100 preset. As you can see, the differences are subtle but apparent. While I prefer the results produced by the Lightroom profile, I think the case can be made for using either as a starting point. I guess at the end of the day, I'm just happy that I now have two different places to start from when editing my RAW files from my Fujifilm cameras.

Lightroom Velvia Profile