London streets with the Fujifilm GFX 50R and Canon 40mm 2.8 STM

I was back in London briefly last week and had a very short bit of time wandering the streets on my way to meet some old friends for dinner. I’d decided to take the Fuji GFX 50R with me, paired with the Canon 40mm 2.8 STM pancake lens via the Kipon EF-GFX autofocus adapter.

I picked up the Kipon adapter and a couple of second-hand Canon lenses a while ago as a bit of an experiment and in order to get a decent wide lens at a lower budget until I could afford the native Fuji GF 23mm f4. To go with the adapter, I bought the 24mm tilt-shift lens as a wide option that should have good sensor coverage, the 100/2.8L Macro for a bit of film ‘scanning’ and because I saw a few recommendations and it was relatively cheap, the 40/2.8 STM pancake lens.

This was my first real outing with the 40/2.8 and it really does pull down the overall size of the GFX, sitting quite nicely on the rangefinder-style 50R body. Autofocus with the Kipon adapter was generally accurate but quite slow, which is to be expected. After a while I switched to manual focusing, but while running-and-gunning as I made my way across London, I did eventually fall back to autofocus. I need to practise more, but manually-focusing without slowing down and zooming in didn’t have a very high hit rate for me, so I managed with the slow AF (the original Fuji X100 had terrible AF speed but was still a fun street camera).

The photograph up top was one of three reasonable images I got on my way. The bright vertical lines of the central building stood out in the sunshine and I liked the pair standing talking in the lower right. The next person into the scene is sadly and awkwardly obscured by the signpost but never mind: this was just a no-pressure test of the Canon lens on the 50R.

I took another couple of frames which, cropped to 17x6 pano ratio, I like enough to share:





Overall, the Canon 40mm 2.8 STM worked quite nicely on the GFX 50R and it’s a combo I’m sure I’ll use more in future. It makes the GFX 50R that much more portable compared to any of the GF lenses and has the autofocus advantage over the smaller manual lenses I also sometimes use.

Realistically though, I’m probably better off generally taking the X-Pro2 with me for street photography sessions. It’s a faster, smaller, lighter camera to work with overall which makes it easier to carry for long periods of time, while the smaller sensor means you can zone focus a bit more easily on manual lenses. The apertures you need to stop down to on the medium format sensor in order to zone focus require a lot more available light.