Photography Gear News

I’ve read a few reviews of the X-Pro1 dismissing its use in the studio, confining it purely to the realm of event and documentary photography. Obviously this a genre at which it excels and the core of the system’s philosophy. But as most of you know these cameras have now become my main system, not merely a fun add-on. Which means they ARE used for studio jobs. All kinds of studio jobs.

I recently did a shoot for Serdy Media, a production company which owns several specialized TV stations in Quebec — namely Zeste and Évasion, the french food and travel channels. This was a studio product shoot for their new online boutiques. After thoroughly testing the setup, I decided to again forego my Nikon kit and do the entire session using only the X-Pro1 and the 35mm Fujinon XF f/1.4 lens. It worked beautifully.

The X-Pro1 actually has several things going for it for this type of work:

- The ability to use the rear LCD for live view without changing how you usually work with the camera.

- The two zoom levels with built-in sharpening to pinpoint the focus.

- Large focus point coverage.

- Horizon line and framing guides.

- The ability to switch the same lens to macro mode for detail shots.

- No mirror to deal with. Combined with the timer function this is as stable as it gets.

All of this makes for a very easy going experience and allows for extremely precise work. The two points of contention when it comes to shooting this camera for studio and/or flash photography are 1) sync speed and 2) tethering. The sync speed obviously wasn’t an issue in this case. As for tethering, I’ve discussed my solution in another post already: an Eye-Fi Pro X2 card. To be honest this was definitely the weakest link in the chain, and I was very fortunate to work with a client who didn’t mind the glacial speed at which photos were getting transferred to the computer. But I didn’t like it. I made jokes about it but it bugged the hell out of me the entire time. I’m glad further testing has revealed an ad-hoc network to be exponentially faster. I won’t get caught with this problem again.