This is a story about focusing my cameras, just some waffle about the Olympics to set the scene at the beginning...
For those not in the know, the Olympic Games are coming soon over here in the UK (well, “London 2012” would suggest that the rest of the country just pays for it but has nothing to do with it) – anyhow, to keep the rest of the country at ease with it all the Olympic Flame has been doing the rounds.
My wife’s school had one of the torches for a day so that the children could have their photos taken with it. They're an infant school (age 5, 6, and 7) so probably a bigger deal for the parents than the kids I would imagine.
I was asked to be the photographer for a day. Nice one, no problem. Cameras all set up and ready to go, we chose a spot in the corner of the main hall with windows each side, nicely set up to let light in from both sides. The main florescent lights were also switched on.
We grabbed a partition screen as a neutral backdrop and pinned a Union Jack to it, which seemed fitting. A stool for the kids to sit on, readily positioned so all they really had to do was sit down, hold the torch and smile :-) To be fair to the kids they were great and did just that.
X100 set up on my tripod, I would use this with its built in flash for a little fill light and my X-Pro1 + 35mm lens hand held and no flash (it’s on my wish list – still not sure which one though…). Everything was setup and nothing to do really apart from sit the kids down and push a button.
But no!
Focus. The X-Pro1 really struggled to focus. The distance from the subjects was 1 meter, plenty of light and, well, nothing difficult for the cameras at all I would suggest. The X-Pro1 would require me to try four or five, maybe more times before it would get a fix. I was using the rear LCD for practical issues, and also to get an accurate composition and focus point.
The X100 handled focusing much, MUCH better, but still not a fix 100% of the time. As the X100 was on a tripod I had no worry to compose, I just selected a focus point on the face and half pressed then pressed.
The X-Pro1 focus was so significantly erratic in a pressure situation that I chose to manually focus. This wasn’t too much of an issue in the end as I basically pressed the camera up against the X100 so new the distance wouldn’t change drastically.
In conclusion, I was pretty disappointed and very much hope that some upcoming firmware can improve the focus capabilities of the X-Pro1 as it did with the X100. However, the quality of the images was excellent. ISO 400 on the X100 and 2000 on the X-Pro1 as I wanted to make for a fast shutter and at this distance wanted ~f4.
Also, sorry no pictures to go with this, but for obvious reasons I deleted all picture from my SD cards as soon as I had copied them to the schools computer…
EDIT - Altered to add the fact that on the X-Pro1 I was using the 35mm 1.4 lens.
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