New Lens Day
Do you believe in coincidences? Because I’m starting to question them. Every time I go to the supermarket, I deliberately park in the furthest, emptiest corner of the car park so some lunatic doesn’t ding my doors. And yet, on the long trek back to my lonely little space, what do I always find?
A car parked right next to mine. Practically touching. You couldn’t slide a Rizla between us. And there’s not another car within 50 yards.
It isn’t just car parks either. The universe is playing mind games with me.
Bus Wankers
Why is it that when I’m sitting on the bus, all the glamorous, perfumed twenty-somethings breeze right past me? Can they smell my stench? The odour of the dirty old man I seem to be slowly turning into year by year? I’m sure they can, just as surely as I can smell the stench of my eventual travelling companion.
I’m downwind of him, and the second he gets on the bus — paying cash, of course — that creeping inevitability settles in. He takes many forms: the unwashed wanderer, the Strangeways Strangler with his erratic tics… or, like yesterday, a morbidly obese bloke who wants to cosy up to me in the worst possible way. Whatever flavour he comes in, he always makes a beeline for me.
Wrong ’uns, rogues and reprobates. People with nicknames like Dogface McGrinley, Backdoor Baz and Phil the Preacher. They can’t get enough of my company.
Third Time Lucky?
And then another coincidence (or is it just inevitability at this point?) — six months after pre-ordering the new Fuji 23mm pancake lens, right at the moment I’ve finally convinced myself I don’t need yet another bit of glass — I get a dispatch notification. It’s on its way.
I won’t wander off into a pointless sidebar about whatever miracle Fuji has supposedly pulled to make themselves so popular that the law of supply and demand dictates that it takes half a year to ship what I already know is going to be an entirely average lens.
Well then, why get it in the first place? The huge pre-order backlog, the embarrassingly cynical price tag, and all the compromises an f/2.8 pancake prime inevitably comes with. The only real reason is this: it’s small. That’s it. And, if I really need to justify it, it’s got a clicky aperture ring.
Caught Between Two Worlds
At the moment I’m stuck between two camera systems: Fuji and Sony. I’ve spoken ad nauseam about the uneasy, co-dependent relationship I have with the Sony. It makes me do things I don’t want to do — like be seen in public using it for example. Yet at the same time it fills a hole deep inside me that’s terrified of coming home with photos that are ever so slightly out of focus.
No need to worry about that anymore. The photos are shamelessly sharp. Even when I try to balls something up in a pathetic, apathetic act of self sabotage, the IBIS and focus tracking take over like they’re staging an intervention.
I barely use the Fuji’s anymore. Every now and then, in a weak moment, I’ll drop a comment in one of the Fuji Facebook groups I’m still clinging onto — usually raining on the parade of whatever new camera they’re celebrating, with some sly dig about whatever autofocus improvements they can shoehorn into those pretentious bodies will be about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
And I’m not alone. There are others like me — fellow Sony converts. Illuminated by the sickly blue glow of our phones, penning their own anti Fuji diatribes, faces twisted into little masks of bitterness. We’re all bitter about being forced to use such ugly cameras.
Reuniting with an Old Friend
But there was a bit of light in the darkness this week when I finally released the X-T20 from its shoebox prison in the wardrobe. It had been barely used recently, only making an appearance when I felt like taking a few snapshots around where I live. My first real camera and I’d been treating it like a mushroom — feeding it shit and keeping it in the dark for months.
I’d been toying with selling it while the Fuji second-hand market is still in this ridiculous bubble — so now as the designated driver for the new lens, it has a temporary stay of execution while I see how I get on with this 35mm-equivalent lens. And it’s a match made in heaven, at least from a looks standpoint.
The two of them together are like some ludicrously otherworldly power couple — Brad and Angelina, off to adopt their seventeenth baby from some far-flung town no one’s ever heard of.
Overly long metaphor aside, it’s an inspiring little setup. Light, ergonomic and wonderfully tactile. It may make odd noises and miss focus, but it has something the Sony will never have: beauty. Maybe amongst the coincidences and chaos, every now and then something good slips through. Even if it is just a tiny Fuji lens.
