16mm – A dabble in photography

I’ve been trying out the fuji 16mm f/1,4 lens recently which is a wide angle lens (equivalent 24mm in full frame terms). It has a minimal focusing distance of 15cm (from the object to the sensor) so in real life you can pretty much put the lens a couple of centimetres away from an object and get it in focus.

The effect is interesting, I believe, on natural objects and much less on people where the distortion can be very unbecoming.

The lens opens at f/1,4 and most of the photos in this article were taken at this aperture. The lens is very sharp wide open. Plenty sharp enough to get good details.

Fujifilm gives the 16mm lens a 1:0.21 maximum magnification at the closest focusing distance. This means that at this distance the size of an object photographed will be 21% of its size on the sensor. A real macro lens is 1:1 that is to say that the object is the same size on the sensor as it is in real life. I take this as an indication of how big things will appear on the sensor. As the XF16mmF1.4 is a wide angle lens, this gives plenty of space around the subject even if the lens is very close. In the previous photo, I had my camera right up against the pink flower.

With so much space around the subject, the quality of the out-of-focus areas becomes very important. As you can see, thankfully everything is very smooth and the colours are great.

The depth of field is very small at this wide open aperture. I used a depth of field calculator, and the result was 0.44cm! That is half a centimetre! Thankfully the x-t2 I was using focuses accurately and swiftly, even at this distance.

I tried to add an extension tube to the lens. I own the mcex-16 which is just a 16mm long tube that goes between the body and the lens. An extension tube enables a lens to focus even closer. Unfortunately, the mcex-16 does not work with the fujifilm XF16mm. The focusing distance becomes lesser than the length of the lens. I tried anyway on a flower head and here is what I got.

On the fujifilm website, it says that the mcex-11 works with a magnification of 1:0.91. The distance between the end of the lens and the object is only 1cm though. It may be nice to give it a try!

This wide angle lens, undeniably useful for landscapes, architecture and such, has become a lens I always keep in my bag. I have been taking it out on my macro excursions recently. It allows me to find new angles and new compositions.

The cover photo is a stack of 5 images, all focused at different parts of the mushroom. Photoshop aligned the layers and focus-stacked everything automatically for me. I just went into Color Efex pro 4 to do a bit of work on the colours.