My wife has been a Fuji X shooter for many years and I’ve seen a lot of photos from the system. While there’s nothing really wrong with them, they’ve always felt very sterile and boring to me. In 2020 I got myself a Fujifilm X100V and while the camera was fun to use, the images it produced left me wanting in that same way. I wondered, how much of this was due to the modern lens design of the Fujinon lenses as compared with older formulas.

I order to find out, I bought a cheap adapter and mounted an old Olympus Zuiko 50mm/1.2 on my wife’s old Fujifilm X-T2, that was gathering dust in a book shelf, and shot a few tests. I loved the results! None of that barrenness, but instead quirky and alive. However, since a 50mm is quite tight on a APS-C sensor and since I love the Voigtländer 58mm/1.4 so much on my GFX, I made a leap and ordered the fairly new Voigtländer Nokton 35mm/1.2 for Fuji X, even though there weren’t many reviews online and those I found mostly bashed it due to softness wide open and the steep price.

The Voigtländer Nokton 35mm/1.2 X is a fully manual focus lens. The helicoid on my copy is buttery smooth and the small size of the lens makes it really, really quick to operate. As a matter of fact, I’m much faster with focusing this than I am fiddling with a tiny joystick to move a focus point around with autofocus lenses. The lens is chipped and transmits f-stops to the body, which is a nice bonus. Oddly enough, the f-stops shown in my Fujifilm X-T2 viewfinder is always off by 0.1, but properly recorded in the raw file. I suspect this is a bug with the camera firmware.

Indeed, at f/1.2 the lens is soft and veiled and the chromatic aberration can be strong in backlit scenes. If you truly need a razor-sharp and optically corrected lens at maximum apertures, this Voigtländer isn’t it. However, in my opinion it’s quite sharp enough for close-up portraits, the purpose I believe this lens was optimized for. For me, the softness really is a bonus, which just about eliminates the need for skin retouch in ambient light. The sharpness improves quickly when you stop down and already at f/2 softness and glow is no longer an issue.

The lens flares easily, especially at f/1.2, but it’s a pleasant analog-looking flare to be embraced for artistic purposes. I also quite like the sun stars. Just like the Nokton 58mm/1.4, this lens has a very nice 3D-like rendering, which maybe is most noticeable in black and white imagery. The bokeh is busy and the bokeh balls have pronounced onion rings and I love it! It feels bubbly, like a glass of nice champagne. The lens has a 12 aperture blade design, so the bokeh balls remain round when you stop down.

For me, this lens on a Fujifilm X-T2, together with profiles from the Archetype Process, lets me get really close to the 35 mm film look, which is exactly what I’m after. With all its perfect imperfections, this is a lens for the soul.

At f/1.2.

At f/1.8.

At f/1.8.

At f/4.

At f/2.

At f/8.

At f/8.

At f/4.

At f/1.2.

At f/2.8.

At f/2.8.

At f/2.

At f/2.

At f/2.

At f/2.8.

At f/3.6.

At f/1.2.

At f/1.2.

I bought a book with photography by Walter Hirsch this summer at an outlet in Höganäs. I actually held that book in my hand back in 2021, at the same outlet, never bought it. I’m glad I this time around spent a whooping 100 SEK, for I was really smitten by his grainy black and white photography, a lot if it shot with a Canon Dial half-frame camera. Many of his photos were scanned and reproduced with the negative borders visible, as I understand it a way of showing that nothing had been cropped out. I’ve had film scanned with borders too, and I’ve always been fond of the look. I wondered if it was possible to approximate that feel also for digital photos and if this was something that should even be considered. How embarrassed would I feel looking at those photos ten years from now?

I looked around the Internet for already existing solutions, and found none. I didn’t want a static png overlay, even if it was scanned from a real film negative. I wanted something that would work in a more organic way.

My first attempt was a series of Photoshop actions, that would draw a path recreating a 35mm film frame, make it into a selection, invert that, feather it a bit and then fill it with black. I made three different actions, with three different paths, and then wrote a small JavaScript that would randomly select which of the three actions that would be executed. While this did work, it also felt very fragile and hard to expand upon.

My next attempt was to write the whole thing directly as an Javascript, without any subordinate actions. For this I had to find a way to represent a path in pure code, so I could store it in my script and make my solution entirely self-contained and easy for others to download and use. Efter a lot of googling, I wrote a companion script, whose sole purpose was to take a path drawn in Photoshop, translate it to code and write that out to a text file. I was now able to collect paths, traced from real film scans in 35 mm, 645, 67, 4x5 (I used photos in a Richard Avedon book for those) and square formats, into a frame library. The main script would then randomly select one out of three frame variations for each format, randomly flip it 180 degrees and then move the frame around on the image, resulting in 66 possible variations per script execution. This was close enough to organically created borders, I decided.

I’ve called the script Poser Frames and it can be downloaded from here, together with installation instructions.

Here are a few frames, simulating the look of 35 mm film.

This one gave me some serious North by Northwest vibes.