Deputy Editor Geoff Harris spent a day shooting a colourful May day festival with the compact yet very versatile Fujifilm X-E5. Did it leave him full of the joys of spring?
Sponsored. We often get asked what camera and lenses people should take with them on a long-awaited photo trip, particularly one further afield.
It’s hard to come up with a one size fits all answer, but as a keen travel and street photographer, experience has taught me to travel as light as possible.
Smaller cameras and lenses are much easier to fit in your bags, greatly reducing the risk of busting your baggage allowance, and once you’ve arrived at your destination, they place much less strain on your hands, back and shoulders (particularly if it’s hot or you are doing a lot of walking).
Having recently spent some time with the Fujifilm X-E5, this is now right at the top of my list of camera recommendations for travel and street photographers wanting to travel light.
Its dimensions are certainly compact – 124.9mm x 72.9mm x 39.1mm, and weighing just 445g including battery – but the X-E5 is certainly no lightweight comes to image quality, or essential extras for serious photographers.
Indeed, the Fujifilm X-E5 has the same high-resolution, 40MP sensor as the company’s hugely popular X100VI compact camera, and the well-regarded X-T50.
Unlike the X100VI, however, you can change lenses, which greatly expands the X-E5’s versatility for a wide range of photographic genres.
It’s also the first X-E series camera to include in-body image stabilisation, enabling you to shoot handheld at lower shutter speeds and still get great results – with up to 7 stops of shake reduction in the centre of the frame when shooting hand-held, and 6 stops in the corners, you can leave the tripod at home.
Video performance is right up there too, with the Fujifilm X-E5 able to record footage at 6k (30p), 4k (60p) and Full HD at 240 p. So it’s quite the pocket powerhouse.
First impressions and Film Simulations
After a particularly depressing winter and so-so April, the Fujifilm X-E5 arrived just in time to cover one of the most photogenic events of the English spring – the Beltane, or May Day, celebrations in the ever-colourful town of Glastonbury in Somerset, UK.
Beltane is the biggest party in the town, and it attracts pagan celebrants (and the merely curious) from all over the world. We’re talking lots of green men and women, maypoles, drummers, music and more.
Anyway, the Fujifilm X-E5 proved to be the perfect camera to take along, particularly when paired with the sharp and discreet 23mm f/2.8 Pancake lens.
You immediately notice the handling improvements from the X-E4, which include the addition of a handy AF/MF switch and clickable rear dial. There’s also a super-convenient film simulation mode dial, which gives easy access to Fujifilm’s excellent Film Simulation modes.
As soon as I started shooting, I found the Velvia simulation ideal for punchy portraits.
On a later visit to the photogenic nearby city of Wells, I also found the ACROS and Classic Chrome film simulations effective when taking atmospheric shots of old buildings.
Now, Fujifilm’s analogue simulations have been around for some time, but what also makes the X-E5 stand out is the ability to save your own favourite Film Simulation ‘recipes’ onto the dial.
It’s quite an easy process, greatly expanding your creative options, and the video below shows how to do it.
Time to get focussed
I found the X-E5 to be the ideal camera for quick portraits at the Beltane festival. The camera and lens are discreet and unthreatening, which helps your subject to relax, and the versatile autofocus modes and face detection mode deliver sharp results every time.
The X-E5’s 40.2MP APS-C X-Trans sensor also gives lots of cropping flexibility, which is really handy with quick portraits at busy events, where you don’t have ages to perfect the background and composition.
There are some advanced AF features too, including the option to specify three Custom AF zones, which can be rectangular groups of AF points of any user-specified size.
And if you like to photograph more than people, there are also subject-detection settings for animals, birds, cars, motorbikes, airplanes, and trains.
If you are tired of boring, bulky black boxes, the Fujifilm X-E5 is a refreshingly good-looking device, with subtle analogue-camera stylings and clean lines. You get a handsome rope strap in the box too.
The controls fall naturally to hand, and another useful extra is a view mode lever. It has four functions, including accessing digital zoom, turn the Film Simulation Recipe on and off, aspect ratio selection and cycling through the LCD / viewfinder view modes.
Video versatility
There are plenty of video options, and you can record footage at in 6K 30p, 4K 60p, and Full HD 60p, with a Full HD 240p option also available in high-speed mode without audio. There’s a standard 3.5mm stereo microphone input and a micro-HDMI output, and more advanced video makers can monitor audio via the USB-C port using a suitable adapter.
The camera’s compact dimensions make it easy and satisfying to record video handheld, and the video mode is quickly accessed via the drive button. All this said, the video features never get in the way of stills shooting, however.
See below for a sample video
Final thoughts on the X-E5
I found the Fujifilm X-E5 to be the perfect camera to shoot a big, noisy, colourful event like the Beltane festival in Glastonbury. You can carry it around all day long without ever noticing its weight, and the bright 2.36m-dot OLED panel viewfinder is great for composing your images or checking settings.
Meanwhile, the 3in, 1.02m-dot LCD can not only tilt up and down, but it can also face forwards over the top of the camera for photographing or videoing yourself.
At the end of the day though, what really sold me was the excellent image quality and autofocus performance, along with the superb handling. All this makes the X-E5 a great alternative to the also very desirable X100VI if you want the versatility that comes with being able to change lenses. So it’s a high five for the X-E5 from me!
