GF55mmF1.7 R WR : Street photography x Angkul Sungthong

GF55mmF1.7 Impression

For creative people who work on advertisements, especially those who are art-based such as an art director or graphic designer, everyone is probably familiar with medium format cameras. Because when we come up with various key visual works to do print ads or billboard works. When we bring the work to professional photographers to take the photos in the studio, to get the highest quality work file, the camera that professional photographers choose to use is a medium format. That is commonly used. There are two camera brands, I think these two brands are familiar.

Many years ago, when I knew that Fujifilm would be serious about medium format, I was excited. This means that the artist or photographer will have a wider range of equipment options. Which is a device that is quite capable of producing very special images. If anyone has ever seen the images from this format camera, it should be easy to remember.

In visual art, the selection of equipment, it’s like choosing a way to tell a story. The nature of the output image, depth of field, color tone and size of the image frame. It directly affects the story and feeling that the artist wants to present to the audience to understand and feel from their works.

GF55mmF1.7 is a medium format lens, when compared with full frame lens, the focal length is 44mm (in 35mm format equivalent), which is very close to the perspective of the human eye. That makes it easy to frame and take photos.

If you’re a bokeh lover, don’t shake your head when you see the f-stop number 1.7 on the lens barrel. Because this is a medium format lens. When compared with a full frame lens, I think it’s around F1.2. The depth of field is very shallow. For bokeh lovers, if you try GFX, I’m sure that you will love it.

For the street work that I shoot, we tend to use a high f-stop number to control the depth of field. It means to go deep into the image. This is for connecting the relationships of the stories in each layer together, but the way we can blur the foreground. It is like painting the atmosphere to create a new environment for the main subject that we shoot. It helps to create a strange feeling for the photos that we can take.

And the highlight topic is here. Rendering quality, blur and bokeh are really extraordinary. With the GFX’s large image sensor, image detail, the gradient lighting shifts from dark to light. It’s quite possible to do it like a miracle. When this image sensor is used with a lens that has a high-quality lens element, it gives a very high-resolution image. There is no way to get an image like this with a camera with a smaller image sensor. This is the medium format’s peculiarity.

If you think about carrying a camera, you want to get the best image quality. You don’t want to compromise on image quality anymore. Or you feel that the thing you want is more than the full frame camera can give you. There are no other options. In addition to cameras with a large image sensor like the GFX and GF55mm F1.7, which is a high-quality lens.

I don’t know what camera it is, it’s a lot of cheating. It’s all beautiful when taking photos, all the beautiful images come out.