The sweet 16... brings back memories... This time it makes memories. I'm talking about the new Fujinon 16mm f1.4 lens of course. I've read reviews of that lens before it was available, from many great photographers like Tomasz Trzebiatowski from Fuji Love, or Matt Brandon and his views of Kenya. There are plenty of others. This convinced me. This lens is absolutely wonderful. I love shooting wide open, and having an electronic shutter of 1/32000 on the Fuji X-T1 makes it very possible to create images in day time and with the lens wide open at f1.4.

I decided to try it out on my blooming apple tree. It was in perfect light, and .... completely covered with bees. I have an aversion to flying, buzzing things, but I wanted to see how the bokeh looked like and how wide and how close I can get. With skin crawling, and suppressing my want to drop the camera, and bolt while screaming like a girl (sexist comment :) ) I stood my ground. This Fujinon 16mm f1.4 lens, has a very close minimum focus at 15cm, which for me is murder when trying to photograph flying bees. The results are quite spectacular though. Bokeh is soft and creamy, just how I like it. The subject separation is great, giving me a nice wide environment to place the subject in.

Build quality is solid, with nice clicks of the aperture ring. Much better than the Fujinon 14mm f2.8, which on my copy are quite loose. It's a still quite small and light and with focusing and depth-of-field scales it makes it easy to focus manually. It definitely found it's way to my bag.... Oh oh, almost forgot, It's absolutely perfect for hip street shooting :)