The idea for this session was to take a camera that is known primarily as a street photographer’s go-to, but to take it into the studio and really push it to capture challenging subject-matter in a demanding situation.

Our fantastic dancer Lisa Synnott was great to work with – very open to the impromptu changes to the setups with constant ideas thrown in by participants throughout the shoot.

We were keen to explore the Fujifilm XT-5’s intelligent hybrid AF system with subject detection with a dancer in the studio, and assess the camera’s capability as a quick responder to action and face / eye detection for portrait and action work. We also had a go at using ‘continuous high’ for burst mode shooting with movement.

For this shoot we paired the Fuji with our Profoto lighting equipment, and played around with colour gels and our Optical Spot with gobos for some extra fun. Technically the Fuji was amazing to work with in the studio – we used the dedicated Profoto Connect Pro for Fujifilm to control our lights from the camera, and shot with the camera in Manual at the native flash sync speed of 1/200s.

When we tried the continuous high burst mode we had to increase our ISO to 800 to lower the power enough for the lights to cope with the high speed shooting. This did introduce some noise which is honestly barely noticeable, but we could have managed this by choosing to use higher-powered lights instead. The camera struggled to track focus when we turned off our room lighting (so that participants could use the modelling lights on the Profotos to play with other Fuji cameras during the shoot) which is not surprising as it was pretty dark in the studio. The quality of the ISO 200 shots is unbelievable – extremely detailed with gorgeous colours and tones!

This was a great opportunity to play with Fujifilm’s gorgeous range of crop-sensor cameras in the studio to get a feeling for taking them off the streets!

Thanks so much to Matt from Fujifilm Australia for coming to Adelaide to share these beautiful cameras with us. We are looking forward to our next Fujifilm workshop working with the GFX in the studio under even more challenging conditions! Thanks also to all the participants – you all got involved and offered amazing suggestions as we worked together to explore dance, movement, composition, form and colour in the Pro Studio.