GF55mmF1.7 R WR: Still Life x Nando Esteva

My name is Nando Esteva, I am a professional photographer and I have been working for 28 years in the world of artistic advertising photography and videography. I love my work in the world of advertising, still life photography, portrait, architecture and gastronomy.

I started my career in the world of photography at the age of 16, learning and evolving in analogue photography, where I spent endless hours in the developing room. I remember that time when the slide frame was loaded and how we learned about light and the behaviour of analogue film in front of objects.

A few years later I was lucky enough to experience the evolution of digital photography in every sense of the word, we changed from 120mm film to digital cameras and saw the quality increase year after year.

My beginnings with Fujifilm were many years ago, when I was shooting with Fujifilm FinePix S2 and S3 Pro SLR cameras was when everything started to change for me, I remember the colours I used to get outdoors with this camera, they were incredible blues, during those years it was the best digital photography camera, later I met again with the Fujifilm X-T3 and X-T4, and X-H2S and GFX100 nowadays, thanks to these cameras I have perfected and professionalized my creative facet in audiovisual, obtaining an amazing quality.

Approximately 11 years ago I started to work in personal artistic photography, directing relevant projects in my career, recognised all over the world and winning 128 international awards to this day.

My passion for gastronomy and everything that encompasses the hospitality industry is the reason why I have made such a special project where gastronomic art, architecture and portraiture come together in a very striking and colourful photographic series. In the pre-shooting tests I felt very comfortable with the union of my GFX100 and the new fujifilm GF55mmF1.7 lens.

I organised the session for the test of the new Fujifilm GF55mmF1.7 lens in my photo studio, where I have a photo and video set upstairs and a kitchen downstairs, where all the gastronomic experiments created for my art collections take place, and where renowned chefs have been cooking their delicious dishes to be photographed.

In the test of the new Fujifilm GF55mmF1.7 lens we prepared a very special photo session with the chef Ariadna from Ninuma-Concept, her creations are very related to my style in artistic photography, she paints her cocoa works delicately with colour spray, it was a very dynamic photoshoot, we prepared the set with two sets, one for the gastronomic painting process and the other one for the portraits and still lifes.

Ariadna, the chef, painted her cakes with very interesting chromatic ranges of velvety texture, combining something incredible between the chocolate, the cakes and the black background which is the decoration where we will take the product photographs. The images that I obtained required agility so that the chocolate and the paint that wraps the cake does not oxidize or melt, for that reason I found that the combination GFX100 + GF55mmf1.7 were perfectly adapted for the realization of demanding still lifes with a time limit to get the photo.

I shot the still lifes on a very thin and light black metraquilato background, lighting my scene with a minimum of light to test the ISO of the camera with an aperture of 1.7 and achieve maximum brightness, dynamic range and blur effects with an amazing quality where the magical blur I achieved and its sharpness added to the large format of my camera made for a stunning photograph with amazing detail and sharpness.

The fujifilm GF55mmF1.7 is very versatile, it has a very short focusing distance of approximately 30cm, this makes it possible to photograph still life very well, taking into account that the GFX100 gives me 291mb files with dimensions of 11,648×8736 pixels, it allows me to reframe without any problem, obtaining very balanced shots.

We put the new GF55mmF1.7 lens to the test making some very special portraits of Ariadna, painting her body with gastronomic paints together with pigments with a nice chromatic range, it is a light weight lens that fits perfectly with my GFX100 and GFX100S.

In the outdoor shots, I checked how the lens reacted when taking architectural photographs of a building that I love, the Palma de Mallorca conference centre, merging the shapes of the pastels photographed in my studio with the geometry of the building.

Something that fascinates me is to be able to go out with my large format GFX100 with a compact lens on the street, thanks to its lightness it allows me to work on these photos with the camera and achieve the highest quality.

The experience with the new Fujinon GF55mmF1.7 lens together with my GFX100 large format camera has reminded me of my beginnings in professional slide photography because of its texture, softness in blur and the great dynamic range I get with every image I take.

I definitely can’t travel the world without my Fujifilm cameras in my suitcase.