A bit of nostalgia hitting me today.

Not saying I miss my medium format Fujifilm GFX 50R that I had to sell to finance my recently acquired Hasselblad 907x 100c.

That would be a stretch.

The Fuji GFX 50R lacked the flair and elegance of the Hasselblad. Place them side by side and the Fuji will even look average and pedestrian.

Nevertheless, the Fuji GFX 50R was a very capable entry-level medium format camera.

It was competent and as a product it deserves all my respect and praise.

So I thought about writing a few words here and sharing some photos I took with this wonderful Fuji GFX 50R that I once owned.

The dance show

Years ago, my other half was member of this Chinese dance group and I was invited to attend their annual showcase. I was not sure what to expect, didn’t ask, didn’t do much research about the venue.

Half-heartedly, laziness involved, I decided to take the Fuji GFX 50R coupled to the small and portable GF 50mm f/3.5 LM WR lens, which has an equivalent full frame 40mm focal length.

Show started and I soon realized I had to overcome two problems: (1) I was quite distant from the stage and there was no way I could isolate the subjects with my lens. And (2) it was not a fast lens at all, with f/3.5 maximum aperture I was struggling.

I looked around and saw these guys with super large DSLRs, machine-gunning the dancers with their long and fast aperture, white body lenses mounted on monopods.

Brought a knife to a gun fight.

Or had I?

“Every guy here is taking the same photo with the same machinnery, so let’s try something different.”

After a few test shots, I checked the 50MP medium format sensor of the Fuji GFX 50R allowed me to crop-in considerably and still get presentable group images. So I had to look for interesting group compositions.

Then I thought, let’s find the correct fast shutter speed / high ISO combination. I needed a fast shutter speed to avoid motion-blur, had to crank up ISO as a result. But noise levels had to be acceptable. I settled at ISO 3200 and 1/200 of a second. Sometimes 1 stop faster or slower shutter speed, depending on the situation.

I was deliberately underexposing. I had no other choice, I had to trust the RAW files ability to raise the brightness / exposure levels at post-editing. On the other hand, I realized the existing conditions of the stage, with lots of light and brightness, would produce rather uninteresting photos.

So underexposing, playing with dimly lit subjects surrounded by darkness, was both an aesthetic choice and out of convenience due to the limitations of my lens. But it worked.

A couple of days after the show, my girlfriend showed me the photos from the other photographers. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but frankly… Those looked really boring.

Most of them, you could see, were shooting with no creativity involved. Just shooting randomly, spray and pray, taking advantage of their super luminous long lenses to isolate the subjects. And high fps continuous shooting mode.

There were hundreds of photos. Instead of observing the dancers, their movement, finding the perfect body shape in a given dance flow and locking it with one shot, these guys were just spray and praying.

Most photos had very poor composition and high brightness levels.

In short, very functional. They were shooting like paparazzis, in a way.

This made me feel proud of my photos. When I shared them with other members of the dance group, they were like “wow, these look so cool, so different”. Yes indeed.

As a photographer, you need to be creative. You need to overcome the limitations of your gear with creativity. You need to look for solutions, you need to think out of the box and turn an unfavourable situation into an opportunity to create something new.

Or you can opt to give up and complain about your camera gear, use it as an excuse to justify failure.

Which way you want to go is something for you to decide.