Native Mount 3rd Party Glass On GFX Medium Format (Preview): TTArtisan 90mm f/1.25.
Have not had this bad boy nearly long enough to form a coherent opinion about it. Will that stop me from posting the first few pics I took with it? Nope. Not at all.
There are three ways to go with GF mount lenses.
Native AF GFX lenses from FUJIFILM.
Interestingly no 3rd party lens makers seem interested in making AF lenses for GFX. So, if AF is what you want FUJIFILM lenses it is. This is not a bad thing. As one would expect they are excellent. But save a few they are quite pricey. The two least expensive run around $1,000 new. One being a zoom and the other a prime that overlap in focal length I went for the smaller prime, purchased used thank you very much.
And so far so great. I am very happy with it. But since I am averse to the size and expense of the remaining lens options I went a different way when fleshing out the remainder of my lenses.
Adapted lenses.
I just so happened to possess two prime lenses that work quite well on GF. You do lose AF but these are much less spendy and provide even faster apertures to exploit that additional sensor real estate. Many adapt film medium format lenses, but I have lucked up and both 35mm lenses already in my possession cover the GFX image circle with a touch of vignette at times.
But when it came to acquire a portrait lens I really had no desire to cough up the bokeh tax required for an f/2 or faster native AF lens. Fine lenses all, but no. As much as makes no sense I was after the lowest cost solution to meet my needs. I could have given the M portrait lens I had a try, but I wanted something even faster than what Fujifilm or that f/1.8 lens had to offer. That brings us to the last category.
Native mount 3rd part manual focus glass.
There are way more lenses in this category than I would have guessed. My selection process was easy. I went to MPB and KEH and searched for the least expensive used, fast portrait lens. This lens won. It’s not that expensive new and I got mine used in like new condition with all caps, box, and packaging for more than a couple hundred less. Nice.
Then I looked at reviews. Luckily for me, it was mostly good news. The only dings are to be expected.
- A bus of a thing.
- What I would expect of a lens this fast for an image circle this large.
- Hard to focus.
- Expected with manually focusing a lens that is an f/0.9875 equivalent lens, but I have read that the focus ring is stiff also.
Then it arrived and I must say the build, look, and feel impressed me right away.
A perfect aesthetic fit for the GFX as well. Gives off a mother of all DSLRs/vintage glass mash up vibe, which is a neat trick for a mirrorless camera.
With the formable grip on the GFX100S this pairing would also make for a fine cudgel in a pinch should a melee weapon be needed for the upcoming uprising… zombie apocalypse… Eh. Let us just say it is a solid feeling set up in hand. A bit heavy, but just reminds you that this kit means business. And that business is bokeh.
This was made evident when on day one I found it easy to nail focus using FUJIFILM’s neat little two screen manual focus dealie.
No human subjects yet. I have tested it out and all is well. Just waiting on one more bit of kit, my go to TTL flash for on camera bounce card fill, before I give that a real go in the wild. Enough yammering. Here are the day one sample pics.
2 of 3.
3 0f 3 and passed with flying colors.
Thoughts.
It does all of the portrait lens things.
- Great colors.
- Sharp where it matters.
- I have read some reviews where it is said that this lens is not that sharp in the center wide open, but I have no issues here. And I guarantee you that every pic above was taken wide open.
- Have also read that the corners can be blurry but that is not what I bought this lens for, so I am good.
- Great bokeh.
- Vignette is mostly well controlled and easy to fix when it isn’t.
- In daylight conditions I did not notice any vignetting.
- Did notice vignetting pop up inside, but after testing a view profiles I found that using a Voigtlander 10mm f/5.6 LR lens profile (???) fixes it. Odd, but it works and I will not question it further.
- No aberrations I can see.
- No flare that I could see.
- Have read that under extreme conditions like pointed directly at bright at night that flare is an issue. But I am thinking I can either try not to do that or use…
- Later realized that a reversible metal hood is included. What I thought was the unique threaded lens cap was actually a screw on piece that converts the hood to a large slide on front lens cap when reversed. Will take photos later. A set up I have not seen before and I like it. But as you can see above no flare was present without it.
- I found it easy to focus.
- The pics above were pretty much the pictures I took. I had a very high focus hit rate.
Yeah… I am good. We are done here.
Some nits could be picked, but they are trifles that I gladly dismiss at this price point. I paid a little over $300, a mere fraction of the admittedly superior AF having FUJIFILM GF options.
This and the remaining kit all fit in a tiny bag that used to carry my M kit. This is low key amazing. Through a series of chance events and feedback from friends I have accidentally backed my way into a fun and capable medium format kit by trade and repurposing kit I already had with no out of pocket expense. Almost feels like cheating.
Took a while to get here, with another fine digital medium format solution…
…that did not quite make the cut along the way, but I got here.
I am looking forward to see what I can capture going forward. More to come.
Happy capturing.
-ELW
Eric L. Woods 
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