FUJINON GF 30MM F5.6 T/S

A stunning tilt-shift optic for Fujifilm's medium-format GFX system

- Matthew Richards

www.fujifilm.com £3,899/$3,999

I love that tilt-shift lenses enable me to do things in-camera that are difficult or impossible to replicate during editing without some serious compromises. This Fujinon GF 30mm F5.6 T/S is one of the best tilt-shift lenses on the market right now, and arguably the best of all time, as well as being one of the top Fujinon GF lenses, full stop.

So what exactly is a tilt-shift lens? In essence, it has a moveable front section that allows you to tilt the optical path in relation to the camera, or to shift it up and down. The tilt function changes the plane of focus, effectively allowing you to alter the depth of field irrespective of the aperture setting. This can be useful in landscape photography, where you might want everything sharp from a close distance away to infinity. At the other end of the scale, you can create a shallow depth of field for a 'table-top model' effect.

The shift function comes to the fore for architectural photographers. With this, you can keep your camera level and 'shift' the area of a scene captured in the image. The big advantage of this is that it allows you to shoot tall buildings without pointing your camera upwards, so vertical features look upright instead of appearing to lean inwards.

This is one of Fujifilm's first pair of 'GF' tilt-shift lenses for its medium-format GFX camera system. Thanks to the focal length multiplier (or rather the opposite), the 30mm lens has an 'effective' focal length of 24mm in full-frame terms, therefore giving a wider field of view than you might expect. The sibling new lens is the Fujinon GF 110mm F5.6 T/S Macro, with an equivalent viewing angle of using approximately a gomm lens on a full-frame camera and adding a 0.5x macro magnification factor.

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