My father has recently been very into flyfishing. It’s been a lifelong dream of his and the Covid-19 quarantine gave him the chance to really dive into it. The government advised us to social distance and not be in groups so by dressing up in his fishing gear and strolling halfway out in the water at our local beaches he was pretty good at the distancing part. Waving a fishing rod around with a sharp hook at the end of a long line also encouraged some distancing.

After hearing about this marvel of flyfishing for a while I decided to take the X-T3, the Fujinon 50-200mm XF 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 R LM OIS zoom lens and my dad with his fishing rods for a little trip a few weeks back. I haven’t used this lens much and the flyfishing, with my dad standing far out into the water, reduced the available angles for me to shoot from. But having the reach of a 75mm – 300mm full frame equivalent lens should give some options to get pretty close and capture some nice shots anyway.

The lens is pretty big and the X-T3 gets rather heavy when adding the lens and the battery grip, but still, it was easy to handle, at least during a pretty short trip like this. Read a review of the lens over at DPReview.

As mentioned there were few obvious angles to shoot from because I had to stay behind at the shore, but I tried experimenting with moving close down to the water and use the compression the lens gave me, which I found quite pleasing.

I think the photo below looks kind of over-processed, but actually the weather that day was kind of strange, with haze in the background and above the water, the sky and general surroundings took on a pale blue color.

I found the lens sharp and the stabilisation worked very well, even at the long end.

I also brought the X-T30 with the Fujinon 35mm f/2 and took a few black and white images.

As with the tele zoom I found getting close to the ground gave me sort of a foreground, middleground and background. It also added out-of-focus areas which made the my father the main focus.

In conclusion, I found the Fujinon 50-200mm tele zoom working great, with sharp results and great stabilization as long as there is enough light. When it comes to flyfishing I’m still happy with standing on the shore taking photos and later skip eating fish all together (being vegan an all 😉 ).