The Fujinon Red Badge XF50-140mm / X-T4 Combination

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The Fuji X-T4 and Fujinon Lenses continue to wow me at every turn and in this case I want to discuss the Fujinon 50-140 f2.8 lens that I use to shoot Pro and Semi-Pro hockey in today’s arenas.

I have been shooting hockey since the late 1980’s when the arenas had some of the poorest lighting known to man. Today, these arenas are much brighter and for a photographer this means that we can use lower ISO settings than in the past and this translates into our images having less digital noise to deal with.


In the image examples presented here I used an ISO of 3200 at 1/1000 sec @f5. Yes, I could have shot at f2.8 and probably and ISO of around 2500 or lower but at f2.8 the depth of field is not too great.


Anyways, let’s get back to why I am “wowed” by this Fuji camera setup … well, why don’t I just let the images do the talking for me? Before that, I just want to explain my shooting vantage point or lack thereof at this particular arena. A lot of arenas have “photographer portals” cutout of the plexiglass but not so at this arena. Yes, one could always shoot through the glass but you have to find an area that does to have any scuff marks … a difficult but not impossible task. The other option is to shoot from the second level. I do prefer to shoot from ice level but shooting from the second level does offer photo opportunities often missed at ice level. In this case I was about as close to centre ice as one could get.


The other thing is, shooting at ice level (usually at one of the corners), you can fill your frame more often which means much less cropping in post. Other lens options would be to use a tele-converter, a longer zoom lens like the 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 or the 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 or better yet the 200mm f2 telephoto lens. In the future I will rent some of these other options and post my findings.


In this first image, you can see exactly what the camera saw - the goalie way in the distance.



This second image shows the crop that I applied with the rest of the image darkened out.



Finally, we have the cropped version and I have to say that this is quite impressive. I was able to reduce the noise significantly while maintaining a high level of detail and sharpness.



As with most sports images today, if not all, they are for screen display online but even this image as it is right now, cropped as much as it was, it is still approximately 6 inches by 8 inches at 300 ppi. It would not take much upSampling to get it to an 8x10 inch print.

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