It’s not often that a product can be described as a game-changer, no matter how much the term is overused in marketing. However, the introduction of the Fuji GF 500mm f/5.6 lens may qualify. With this lens, for the first time ever, medium format can be a platform for serious wildlife photography.
Although I’m excited about the possibilities that the GF 500mm f/5.6 might offer, it is not my intention today to gush over the new lens. Rather, I want to reflect on the pros and cons of medium format for wildlife photography as it stands today.
Table of Contents
The State of Medium Format for Wildlife Photography
Most medium format cameras today are not geared toward wildlife photography in the slightest. They are generally much slower-paced cameras than anything on the full-frame or APS-C market. Even the cheapest crop-sensor cameras today at least have continuous autofocus! Yet some medium format cameras, like the $8200 Hasselblad 907X & 100C, do not.
Other wildlife-oriented features like high frame rates, subject recognition, and in-body image stabilization are also absent. Worst of all, very few medium format lenses are geared toward photographing distant subjects. This is a painful combination that makes it almost impossible to use medium format for wildlife photography, unless your subject is nearby and standing quite still.
Then there’s the question of price. Even the rare telephoto lenses that do exist for medium format are prohibitively expensive for most mortals. For example, buy a lens like the Schneider 240mm LS Blue Ring f/4.5 AF, and your wallet will be $7300 lighter (plus an extra $2000 for the 2x teleconverter). Until now, the only reasonably-priced “wildlife lens” for medium format was the Pentax 400mm f/5.6 AF, but Pentax’s aging medium format DSLRs are quite unsuited to wildlife work.
Enter Fujifilm, stage right. Their recently announced GFX 100S II sells for $5000, which is less than a full-frame flagship like the Nikon Z9 or Sony a1. Yet it includes subject recognition, continuous autofocus, and 7 FPS shooting. Pair it with the $3500 GF 500mm f/5.6 that was just released, and it’s a truly viable option for wildlife photography.
Image Quality and Crop Factor
Medium format cameras have some significant image quality advantages over full-frame and smaller sensors. At base ISO, they usually have better dynamic range, color depth, and resolution than full-frame sensors from the same generation. In recent years, even high ISO performance has favored medium format over full-frame.
However, one fact working against medium format sensors for wildlife photography is their crop factor. Due to the larger sensor, the crop factor of most medium digital format cameras is 0.79x, as you can see from the image below.
With a 0.79x crop-factor camera like the GFX 100S II, Fuji’s new 500mm f/5.6 is equivalent to a 400mm f/4.5 lens on full-frame. It is also compatible with Fuji’s 1.4x teleconverter, offering a 700mm f/8 lens (560mm f/6.3 full-frame equivalent).This isn’t bad by any stretch, but there is currently no way to achieve longer focal lengths if you need it.
The good news is that you can compensate for some of this by cropping the image, which isn’t hard on a 100-megapixel sensor. For example, cropping the GFX 100S II down to a full-frame area still offers 61 megapixels left over. This means that you can actually put more pixels on a distant subject with a 100-megapixel medium format sensor compared to a 45-megapixel full-frame sensor, given two lenses of the same focal length.
Everything seems to be in favor of the large sensor, right? Are there any clouds in the medium format sky? Well, the first cloud of doubt appears when you look at the file size. Uncompressed RAW files from the GFX 100S II are around 200MB, and compressed ones around 150MB. This places huge demands on the size and speed of memory cards, storage, and computer power.
Next, you need to honestly answer the question: “What does a huge 102MP medium format resolution get me?” Such a resolution and level of detail is obviously overkill for any digital-based display. Unless you’re making large exhibition prints or cropping to extreme levels, 102 megapixels is far more than most people will need.
And apart from the sensor itself, there are various other questions that arise when you consider medium format for wildlife photography. Below, I’ll go through the considerations of autofocus, continuous shooting, image stabilization, handling, and lens selection as they relate to Fuji’s current situation.
Autofocus
Most medium format cameras cannot compete where autofocus is concerned. Fuji is the exception, with the GFX 100 II and GFX 100S II having automatic subject detection of people, birds, mammals, insects, aircraft, and various other subjects. These cameras also use a hybrid phase-detect/contrast-detect system that is based on the autofocus capabilities of their APS-C X-Series cameras. Those features are what allow us to take photos like the one below on medium format, arguably for the first time.
My friend Michal Krause is the one who primarily tested the Fuji GF 500mm f/5.6, and you’ll see that most of the photos in this article are his. During my time with the lens (and GFX 100 II), my impression is that it focused very similarly to the Fuji X-H2. You can read my X-H2 impressions here, but I found that camera to be a quick focuser and good at tracking subjects.
In my experience with the medium format combination, when the bird was relatively close to the camera, the AF sometimes hesitated a little. On one occasion, it even seemed to freeze, and refused to respond to repeated presses of the AF-ON button. These are the kinds of things that the first firmware update will hopefully fix – I was testing a pre-production sample of the lens. We saw something similar with the 150-600mm X-Mount lens, which went on to be fixed.
Michal sent me a lot of photos to choose for this article, and I won’t publish all 58 photos of the flying seagull that he gave me (one of them is shown below). But all the photos in that series were sharply in focus. So, with minor nitpicks, I believe it is fair to say that medium format is now capable of focusing on fast-moving action, even subjects like birds in flight.
Continuous Shooting
Even the fastest medium format cameras cannot compete with most full-frame cameras where continuous shooting is concerned – let alone similarly priced cameras like the Nikon Z9 or Canon EOS R3. The GFX 100S II can reach 7 FPS rather than something like 20+ FPS. That said, 7 FPS is hardly impossible to use for wildlife photography. Even a great camera like the Nikon D850 manages 7 fps (9 fps with the MB-D18). Most wildlife does not need 20 FPS to capture the right pose.
Interestingly, the maximum frame rate of the GFX 100 II with electronic shutter is only 5 fps. However, I don’t recommend using the electronic shutter anyway due to rolling shutter effects, which are more significant on such a large, high-resolution sensor. For this reason, full-frame will likely remain the leader in high-FPS capabilities for the foreseeable future.
At least the buffer is good – the aforementioned 58-image burst was taken on a UHS-II SD card and didn’t exhibit any slowdown. The Fuji GFX 100S II accepts dual UHS-II SD cards, while the more expensive GFX 100 II accepts one UHS-II SD and one CFExpress Type B.
Image Stabilization
Ultra-high resolution sensors are unforgiving. To make the most of them, it is necessary to use either safe shutter speeds or effective image stabilization. Fuji claims that their in-body image stabilization system is capable of up to 8 stops of vibration reduction. My experience with the pre-production sample is that the limit of pixel-level sharpness with the 500mm f/5.6 lens is around 1/200 second handheld. That’s not particularly impressive, although for a 100-megapixel sensor, perhaps it isn’t surprising.
Handling
When I first picked up the GFX 100 II with the new 500mm f/5.6, I was surprised at how light the whole kit is. The body itself, including the battery, is 1030 grams (2.27 pounds). That’s 310 g lighter than the Nikon Z9 – and the GFX 100S II is even lighter still, at 883 g (1.95 pounds). The lens isn’t too heavy either, weighing 1375 g (3.03 pounds). Nikon’s equivalent Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S weighs only a little less at 1160 g (2.56 pounds).
The result is that you can get a medium format system for wildlife photography that weighs less than the Nikon Z9 with the Nikon Z 400mm f/4.5 S. That’s not a bad result at all.
Apart from the lightness, the other dominant impression was the feeling of holding something familiar in my hands. Fuji’s medium format cameras definitely borrow a lot of their DNA from the X-Series APS-C cameras that I’m familiar with. The controls are similar, including the clickable dials. Even the batteries are shared between the two systems. (Though this has the drawback of the medium format camera dying relatively fast; I would consider taking at least two, if not three, backup batteries for a full day of constant photography.)
Wildlife Lenses
No matter how capable a camera is, the real thing that matters for wildlife photography is the lens. Until now, this was lacking in Fuji’s medium format lineup – their longest option was the Fuji GF 250mm f/4, approximately a 200mm f/3.2 full-frame equivalent. The Fuji GF 500mm f/5.6 changes the situation.
The Fuji GF 500mm f/5.6 is similar in many ways to the aforementioned Nikon Z 400mm f/4.5. Mounted on their own cameras, both offer virtually identical field of view and depth of field. Both lenses have the same 95mm filter thread diameter. Their physical dimensions differ only in millimeters, and the weight difference is pretty minimal.
Wildlife photographers often care about a lens’s minimum focusing distance, and the Fuji GF 500mm f/5.6 does well in that respect. The maximum magnification of 0.2x (1:5) allows for relatively small subjects to be captured in the frame. And the 100-megapixel sensor offers ample room for cropping after the fact, so it can even work for photographing larger insects.
The GF 500mm f/5.6 lens has all the usual features you would expect from a lens of this type. In addition to the aperture ring, there’s a switch for the behavior of the four buttons on the front of the lens (AF-L, preset and AF-ON), an image stabilization switch, a focus limiter (full, 5m to infinity), and a SET button to save the focus plane in memory. Nothing strikes me as missing.
Other features worth highlighting are the Arca-Swiss compatible tripod foot, and the window in the lens hood that lets you adjust a polarizing filter without removing the hood. Most importantly, the lens is compatible with the GF 1.4X TC WR teleconverter. Combined with this, you get 700mm f/8 (540mm full-frame equivalent), which gives you a respectable reach.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this article, I asked whether medium format is suitable for wildlife photography. The answer is not quite straightforward. Mostly, it will depend on what you expect from your photos – and whether you are already immersed in a GFX system or just picking up a new system from scratch.
Which wildlife photographers benefit from medium format?
- Photographers who want to achieve the higher image quality of medium format.
- Photographers who already own a medium format camera, and the new telephoto lens will only extend its use to wildlife.
- Those whose entire chain, from memory cards to powerful computers and large storage devices, can handle gigantic files.
- Those for whom the price of equipment is not an issue.
Which wildlife photographers should stick with full-frame or smaller?
- Those who find the resolution (generally 45 megapixels or less) enough for their display needs.
- Those who demand a very high frame rate and the fastest autofocus on the market.
- Traveling photographers, for whom weight and size are of the utmost importance.
- Photographers who demand features unique to smaller sensors, such as auto-capture and pre-release burst.
- Those who need more lens selection; there is no 400mm f/2.8, 800mm f/6.3, or many other such lenses for medium format.
- Photographers on a tighter budget.
At the end of the day, I still would not call medium format ideal for wildlife photography. But for the first time, I think we can safely call it viable. Fuji has done a good job preparing their cameras for the demanding situation of fast-moving wildlife, and now they have a lens that can truly match it. If we continue to see them introduce supertelephoto lenses and continually improve their cameras, medium format may one day match – or even overtake – full-frame as the system of choice for the most demanding wildlife work.