Fuji 100-400mm lens, a first look

Lens focal lengths have specific characteristics that make them suitable for particular tasks and compositions. Super-teles compress space onto a flat plane teasing us to create abstractions of juxtaposed forms. I love working with super-teles for this reason, although their extremely narrow field of view can sometimes be limiting for daily shooting.

I have been photographing with the new Fuji 100-400mm zoom for a couple of weeks in preparation for an extensive, hands-on review. Before completing my tests, I want to see how the lens handles with the higher resolution X-Pro2. In the interim, I thought I'd pass along a few recent examples I took with the lens, both by itself and coupled with the Fuji 1.4x teleconverter.   Below are a few examples I took of the city at sunset last night.

The lens is incredibly sharp, even into the edges and corners, with very little loss of quality from the added extender. It is a large lens, but not as large as you might typically expect from such a long focal length so that it is hand-holdable during the day when the light is bright enough for short exposures. The low light photos here were all taken on a tripod.

The Verazanno Bridge in the background is over ten miles away, and the near building facade on the right is only a few blocks from where I took this photo compressing all the space in between into a flat composition that meshes all the forms into one, flat composition. This is the sort of composition I love about super-teles.