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Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Australia, also following images.
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You may have seen my previous post Why a Fujifilm GFX100RF?. It may be worth reading first if you have not. That covered why my varied photographic experiences attracted me to the Fujifilm GFX100 RF. This post is about my initial experiences with the camera.
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My primary intended use for the camera is for landscapes during travel. It is a 100 megapixel digital camera that directly allows cropping to different aspect ratios. While you can do this in post-production, that is not at all the same as being able to do it in camera. If you can see exactly what your composition will be, especially for wide compositions, you will find different points of view and improved compositions as compared to doing it later.
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What makes having different aspect ratios available on this camera feasible is that because it is 100 megapixels, you still have a lot of real estate left if you throw away half the image in an aspect ratio crop.
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The camera has a digital zoom, activated by a lever on the front of the camera. I would rarely want to use this as in most cases I would “zoom with my feet”. It is easy to accidentally move this lever and end up taking images at a lesser resolution than you intend. Eventually I discovered that there is a setting where you can disable this and that you can assign activating or disabling it to a button (actually, a lever) on the camera.
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There are three ways you can display the chosen aspect ratio in camera. You can have your chose aspect ratio surrounded by a black border, covering the parts of the potential image you are not using. You can also have a grey border so you can dimly see outside your crop. Or the whole image area can be visible and a white line can show the boundaries of your crop. I started off using a black border but I could not tell if I had accidentally activated the digital zoom, so I switched to the white line. Now I know how to turn off the digital zoom, I may return to the black border.
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I always shoot RAW. If you do so on this camera, you see the cropped image in Lightroom or Capture One but if you activate the crop tool, you still have the full area of the sensor to work with. Bizarrely, for this to happen, you must shoot RAW plus JPEG, not just RAW. If you shoot JPEG, you get the cropped image but cannot later increase the size.
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This is a complex camera and requires attention and thought to setting up. In my case it is made more complex because I am using six different cameras. I use two Nikon cameras for live music because they have excellent autofocus and are very sensitive to low light, with one having native ISOs up to 64,000. All my Fuji cameras have max native ISOs of 12,800. I use Fuji for travel and long telephoto because they are more light and compact. So I have two Fuji bodies for that, plus the RF for its unique qualities, perhaps replacing a couple of mid-range primes. And I also have another Fuji body converted for infrared. The RF and one of my Fuji bodies are similar for autofocus but all the others are different and all the cameras have different customisation options. So I have to be very careful when I use a body I haven’t used for a while. Of course I could replace one of the Nikons and two of the Fujis with current models but that’s not a cheap option.
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Quite a few reviews try to make out that the RF is a medium compact version of the X100VI, another fixed prime lens compact camera that has a crop sensor. But it’s not that at all. The RF is similar in some ways but has a different purpose and requires a more deliberative approach.
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This is an infrared image. I used a Hoya R72 filter. That has a 720nm frequency that allows a limited range of colours. My dedicated infrared camera in contrast has a 560nm sensor which allows a wide rage of colours. This is not possible with a lens filter on a camera with an ordinary sensor. As you can see, it is possible to get an infrared image but it is marginal. Many lenses are not suited to infrared and show hot spots in the centre of the image, bright areas that may also have colour shift. In many cases this is difficult to impossible to correct. In the case of the RF, the lens had a shallow hot spot and for some images I could correct that with a radial filter in Lightroom. For others that didn’t work. I could even create a preset for that in Lightroom for cases where it was going to work but it wasn’t as easy in Capture One.
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Passageway to the flagpole over the new Parliament House.
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Looking up at a Rodin Statue.
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Sometimes your intended composition can still improve in post-production. I didn’t really notice the two people much when taking the photo and composed for a wider image. Later I noticed the were unconsciously mimicking the Rodin sculptures so I changed the crop to emphasize that, making a much better image.
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Reviewers often say the RF is not suitable for low light, including live music. And look at this, you can hardly see anything at all. This is just the way I took it but it wasn’t really that dark when I was there.
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Lecia Louise.
And that’s because it was a test exposure. This is the same image but I increased the exposure by five stops in Lightroom (making it 32 times brighter). So this is a demonstration of the remarkable dynamic range of this camera. Of course it’s not unlimited though. If you push the shadows down so there’s no detail, there’s no way you can get it back.
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Key Grip.
Here is a very difficult lighting situation in which the dynamic range of the RF came in useful. The band is essentially unlit in the bar and there are very bright city lights behind.
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Last Call.
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19-Twenty.
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John Jakob Gwilliam of 19-Twenty.
This is not a savagely toned monochrome, just a savage red light.
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John Jakob Gwilliam of 19-Twenty.
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Kane Dennelly of 19-Twenty.
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Johnny Reynolds.
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Key Grip Celebration Blues.
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Brothers (showing Frank Sultana and Nathan Beretta) at House of Ullr, Thredbo Blues Festival 2026.
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I later went back to the Sculpture Garden to take some photographs at a place that was previously closed.
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Electricity Station, 10 minutes walk out the back gate.
The RF has a fixed lens with a full-frame equivalent angle of 28mm. The Fuji X100 has an auxiliary wide-angle attachment lens (WCL X100) but Fuji is reportedly not considering one for the RF. It is probably not possible to use a WCL X100 on the RF due to the logistics of attaching to a thread on the outside of the lens barrel with an unusual thread size. However, I found a report that the Ricoh GW-4 conversion lens can screw into a 49mm thread like a filter and gives a 21mm full-frame equivalent angle of view. So I got one and the above is a test shot. It only works well at F11 but that is OK if your intended use is landscape or you’re shooting hand-held in bright light.
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Here is another shot using the converter, with the camera on a tripod. It is a five or ten minute walk past the back fence on Mount Ainslie. Ostensibly it is a duotone (different colours for highlights and shadows) but I have also used a different duotone regionally for the sky. This gives a greater sense of depth.
I had the camera at a low angle using the rear LCD screen. I had difficulty seeing to compose in the bright light and had to adjust it later. I had forgotten you can adjust the LCD brightness and even had a setting saved for the on the Quick-Access menu.
One thing I noticed is that the converter gives a much greater depth of field than the RF’s lens. This could be useful for focus bracketing (combining images for a massive depth of field). I probably wouldn’t want to do that too often though, because focus bracketing on a 100mp camera would lead to massive file sizes..
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Overall, this is not a camera for everyone but for me it should prove very useful and practical.
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