Wex is the UK’s biggest seller of photography related equipment and I was invited to an event they hosted at the British Film Institute in London.

Tools for Mastering Filmmaking was a day of equipment and talks about shooting video.

I use my phone for video, but for a number of reasons it is not ideal. At the same time, I don’t want to use my camera for both stills and video.

The setup I am most attracted to, is one of the one-inch sensor action cameras with a built-in gimbal and remote microphone.

The focus for the event was on Nikon and its acquisition of the video camera made RED, and the introduction of the Nikon ZR that pairs Nikon hardware with RED technology.

The guest speaker was Roxy Hemadani, (@roxythezoologist) who gave two talks that she illustrated with her work.

Apart from the technical information, one thing she said is that stories need heroes and villains.

I was thinking about that. What is lost by taking out the heroes and villains angle? Everything we feel and detect is from opposites – light and dark, hot and cold, good and bad, etc. And if we take away the good and the bad, then what motivates us?

Do we become unmoved, emotionally detached because we are designed to be motivated by heroes and villains?

It’s a question.

Meanwhile, the model who had been brought in for the day sat and watched from the back of the room. She was there to be the focus for the video cameras set up on tripods, so we could see how good the cameras were.

We could see how the Nikon ZR Cinema Camera rendered video of her in the screen. With ‘standard’ setting the scene looked nice and warm and natural looking.

But as someone who has only shot video on my phone, I am not the last word in judging the quality of one video camera against another.

The ZR does not have an electronic viewfinder (EVF), so actually focusing on something comes down to the autofocus ability of the camera. One of the reasons I like an EVF is that I can point it where I want.

I guess it takes some getting use to in order to be able to work with video with an EV-less camera.

It is true that my phone doesn’t have an EVF but neither is it a serious video-making machine.

No one was paying attention to the model, who sat at the back of the room while the talks were on.

So I decided to take a photo of her with my Ricoh GRIII, the only camera I brought with me.

She started to pose as you can see here, and I asked her to just to sit.

John (a photographer I know from photowalks) came over and joked to us about me liking bare-bones realism and nothing arty.

She started laugh, and the best two shots would have been great except I had the ISO set too low to capture movement because the light was low.

I shot at 1/20th of a second at f2.8 and base ISO 125

To capture movement I should have set the ISO at 800 or 1600.

ISO 800 would have been almost three stops faster, which would have meant I could shoot at 1/160th second. And that would have frozen the action.

Ah well.

FX Or DX

During her talk, Roxy said the cameras she works with have an inbuilt crop ability, which she uses for extra reach.

That stuck with me and was part of what prompted me to take the photos of the model.

I had asked Roxy, which was to what extent she could see a difference in image quality between full frame (FX) and crop sensor (DX).

She said she could see the difference when she was editing but that most people would not see any difference.

That’s really a big thing, because it means a photographer could put a 70-200 lens on a full-frame camera and have 300mm at the long end when needed.

It also means they could use a crop sensor camera and enjoy the benefits of a lighter, smaller package.

In preparation for shooting the New Year’s Day parade, I went out to take some shots with a Fuji 55-200mm lens on a Fuji X-T50.

I had hardly used the lens and so I wanted to get in some experience rather than find out the shortcomings on the day of the parade.

The Fuji X-T50 is a 40MP APS-C crop sensor camera. which makes the lens an 82.5-300mm full frame equivalent.

I have used a Nikon 70-300mm lens on a Nikon D500. That too is a crop sensor camera and equates to 105-45mm full frame, and so reaches even further.

But the X-T50 has twice the megapixel count of the D500, so the demands on the lens are greater.

Plus which the X-T50 and the 55-200 have image stabilisation, whereas although the Nikon 70-300 has stabilisation, the D500 body does not.

So here is what I learned from shooting the Fuji 55-200mm on a Fuji X-T50.

The X-T50 is a small camera and the lens doesn’t balance well on it.

Also, the lens extends when it zooms. Closed, the lens is 118 mm long. Fully extended it is 177 mm long. The inner barrel extends out as you zoom out to longer focal lengths. And that changes the balance of the lens.

Even with the lens collapsed to its shortest length it feels too heavy for the camera. With the lens is zoomed out and extended, it is hard to keep the focus on the person. I felt like I was weaving all over the place and I thought I was going to get blurry shots.

If the target is big and all in the same plane, then it doesn’t matter if you weave about a bit. But if the target is small and if you miss it you focus on something nearer or further away, then it matters because your shot will be out of focus.

What I didn’t appreciate is that the IBIS (in-body-image-stabilisation) on the camera works really well. The lens too has image stabilisation. And the two work together.

The bottom line is that I was surprised when I looked on the computer screen and saw that even though I felt like I was weaving about, the shots were sharp.

Recommendation

I think the lens would be more pleasurable to use if it was on a bigger camera body that I could hold steadier.

While there are older bodies, I suggest it means the Fuji X-T5 or the Fuji X-H2.

So how do they stack up side by side?

With battery and card the Fujifilm X-T50 weighs 438g. The X-T5 weighs 557g, and the X-H2 weighs 700g.

The only features on the Fujifilm X-H2 that are meaningful to me are a better grip and an EVF with 5.76M dots versus 3.69M dots compared to the X-T5.

However, the extra weight of the X-H2 takes it out of the equation because it doesn’t have other features to swing the balance in its favour.

The features on the Fujifilm X-T5 versus the X-T50 that are meaningful to me are a bigger EVF with 3.69M dots versus 2.6M dots on the X-T50, and bigger dimensions meaning I can grab hold of the camera and hold it steady more easily. So then the only downside is the extra 219g.

What’s the answer? I think as a carry-around camera with a short lens, the X-T50 wins. For a longer lens, the X-T5 wins.

This is a view from Trafalgar Square in London, with the moon, the tower of St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, and the front and the dome of the National Gallery.