GFX100S: “More than Full Frame” x Xiaoyi Zhang

Hands on GFX100s for Outdoor Portrait Photography

I’m Zhang Xiaoyi, a photographer, and I’m very glad that I had my chance to experience the adventure of creative outdoor portrait photography with the brand new model of GFX100S and the GF80mmF1.7 lens.

GFX100S, a model developed based on the technical parameters of the flagship model GFX100, can be considered as a slimmer version of GFX100. By removing the vertical shooting handle, the whole body is much smaller and lighter. It is only slightly larger than X-T4, completely consistent with a full-frame SLR camera. Some optimization and improvement have been done to a part of dials and buttons, to make the operation smoother and more efficient.

It feels good when holding a GFX100S, even for bigger hands. The focus rocking bar is bigger now, which makes it much more comfortable to toggle.

The LCD of the GFX series has always been the best camera screen ever in my opinion, because of its excellent color and fast touching feedback response, not to mention the flip design that allows horizontal and vertical adjustment, which makes it easy for me to realize some extreme picture composition.

The weather on the shooting day was awful. However, the non-stop rain allowed us to test the water-resistance of the camera body and the lens. It turns out that GFX100S and GF80mmF1.7 lens can work in the falling rain for a long period without affecting its stability.

We also had a lot of shooting in the bamboo forest where it was very dark and complex. It could be a challenge to the performance of high sensitivity and focusing for any camera, but GFX100S didn’t hesitate to accurately lock the focus of any picture.

Then let’s talk about the colors, the pride of Fujifilm. Our shooting includes a set of gorgeous Han Chinese Clothing. From make-up to costumes, it is quite colorful. It is known to all that the performance of the color red is a great challenge to cameras, but GFX100S can easily capture and show the difference of red in different depths.

Let’s move to the GF80mmF1.7 lens, a brand-new super large aperture lens, which should also be the auto focus lens with the largest aperture in the medium frame system. To test the imaging effect, we deliberately took a lot of pictures with the full aperture open. The results were surprisingly excellent. The focus under full open 1.7 aperture was still sharp and clear, and stunning bokeh could be obtained at the same time.

Although the weather was bad and the temperature was very low during the whole shooting day, we still shot a lot of high-quality pictures in limited time and conditions. The portability and easy operation of GFX100S made us forget that it was a 100-million-pixel medium-frame camera. It is small, but with tremendous capabilities. It is marvelous.