In September 2020, somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, I finally bought a proper camera. I’d been thinking about it for years and had lost countless hours to YouTube reviews trying to decide what to get. The X-T30 cost ₹84,500 on Flipkart, which made it the most expensive thing I’d ever bought online, and I ordered it without ever having held one. I’d never even seen anyone using a Fuji. Everybody I knew with a camera had a Canon or a Nikon, and anyone moving to mirrorless was buying Sony.
Before that, photography was mostly a reason to choose my phones. The Sony Xperia Arc in 2011, then the HTC One, then the Google Nexus 6. None of them made much sense for someone living in Bhilai, where the service networks were practically nonexistent. But the cameras were good and the phones looked good. The Xperia had that curved back and the HTC One had those enormous speaker grilles. The Nexus had a silver-and-black finish I still think looks better than most phones since. I’ve always had a slightly vain requirement from the things I buy. They should stand out.
The Sony a6400 was the sensible choice. More lenses, an easier system to build around, better on paper in most of the ways that were supposed to matter. I kept coming back to the Fuji anyway and couldn’t have told you why at the time. Retro styling was part of it, and the rest was the same vanity that had picked the phones.
Flipkart said five days. Those five days took considerably longer than five days should. When the box arrived I carried it into the room where I worked, closed the door and opened it carefully. The camera was smaller than I’d imagined and a little awkward to grip, but none of that mattered. I’d have taken a fall myself before letting anything happen to it. I’d ordered it with the 18–55mm bundle rather than the more expensive 18–135, which was the wrong call, though it took me years to understand that. I didn’t know enough about focal lengths to make the decision myself, so I went with the reviews, most of which praised the 18–55 as too good to be called a kit lens. My first photograph was the fading green wall in my room. Then I watched another couple of hours of YouTube videos about settings and went into the back garden, where there were flowers and butterflies everywhere. Those were the next ones, along with a line of ants working across a leaf.
The expectation I’d walked in with was simple enough. If my eyes could see something near and something far, the camera should manage both better than my phone. That was the whole point of buying a proper camera. It didn’t take long to find out how wrong that was. I’d ride out, stop at a mountain or a lake, frame the shot, zoom to the end of the range and realise the photograph in my head wasn’t available from where I was standing. That’s how I learned what focal length actually means. It also taught me that the best zoom you own is your legs, and most of the time the fix is to start walking. Very few lenses do everything well, and a beginner’s first lens should probably be something versatile, an 18–135 or one of the newer 18–300s. You give up some sharpness and aperture, and you get enough range to find out what you actually like photographing. Once you know which focal lengths you use most, spend the money on something specialised.
My 18–55 had its own problems. I never got the sharpness I expected from it and it developed motor errors. In Leh in 2022 it failed outright, halfway through the trip. Maybe I got a bad copy. A couple of suggestions I found on Reddit got it working again and I carried on with it. Either way, reviews can tell you what a lens is capable of, not what your copy will do, and not what you’ll want to photograph.
By the start of 2023 I’d fallen for bokeh. Everybody does. You spend a couple of years with a kit lens, you see what a fast prime does to a background, and the next lens you want is the one that does it. The low-light performance was part of the appeal, but mostly I wanted the shallow depth of field that only a fast prime gives you straight out of the camera, before any editing. Fuji’s own primes were mostly at shorter focal lengths and priced well past what I was willing to spend, so I started looking at third-party glass, which is how I found Viltrox. I’d never heard of the company. After far too much research I bought their newly released 75mm f/1.2 for around ₹39,000.
The difference between what came out of that lens and what came out of the 18–55 was almost comical. A few of those photographs made my jaw drop. I took it to Xuzhou in December that year. Winter, and dark by the time I finished work and got back to the hotel, so almost everything I shot there was in low light. An autofocus lens at a useful focal length with an aperture that opens to f/1.2 is close to a dream in those conditions, and I’m still in awe of some of the frames from that trip. My flight home was out of Shanghai, so it ended with a bullet train from Xuzhou and one free evening in the city, which I spent walking around with the Viltrox on the camera. The lens is a behemoth and I felt it by the end of that evening. Mounted on a body as small as the X-T30, the combination looks slightly ridiculous.
The next limitation arrived in December 2024 at Ajanta and Ellora, where I’d gone with some old school friends and carried the Viltrox alongside the old 18–55. The Reddit fix had stopped working that October, so the lens had just come back from a ₹9,500 repair. Both did what they were supposed to do, but I kept running out of room. A fixed focal length means your framing is decided by where you’re standing. If the subject is too close you walk backwards until it fits, and there isn’t always anywhere left to walk. Wildlife was the bigger reason. Kanha is about 250km from Bhilai and a few of us go at least once a year, and there you photograph from wherever the vehicle happens to stop. Walking closer isn’t an option and nothing waits while you think about it. A fixed 75mm was never going to cover that. What I wanted was a zoom with real reach that stayed sharp, and Fuji had three worth considering. The 50–140mm f/2.8 is a spectacular lens and far too expensive, which left the 70–300 and the 55–200. So in January 2025 I found a good deal on the Fujifilm XF 55–200mm and bought it for ₹49,500. It hasn’t come off the camera since. The image quality is excellent, the zoom range is genuinely useful, and for a slow lens at f/3.5–4.8 it has turned into a workhorse. The 70–300 still tempts me, but the 55–200 does almost everything I want.
It did what I’d bought it for on the first trip back to Kanha. The deer came off that lens, and so did the kingfisher I used as the hero image on 36 Frames.
If the 18–55 had been reliable I’d have covered 18–200mm with two lenses and been perfectly happy. Instead I’m still looking at the wide end. The XF 16–55mm f/2.8 R LM WR II is the obvious answer. Fujifilm India lists it at ₹1,08,500, and even if I found a deal somewhere it would still cost more than the camera did. The other thing pulling me wide is the night sky. When I see a Milky Way photograph my first thought is how the hell did they do that, and the second is that I want to try it myself. One of my favourites came from Zanskar in 2024. I was on the roof of our homestay in Rangdum with the camera on a tripod and the 18–55 at 18mm, and the sky was full of stars. Maybe the scene was good enough that even I managed a few.
That came off the same kit lens I’d spent four years complaining about. A fast wide prime like the Viltrox 13mm f/1.4 would do considerably more, and it’s the other lens I keep looking at. A sky like that still feels like a luxury. Growing up in Bhilai I saw stars most nights. Now you can stand outside in a city and see almost nothing, and getting a proper look means planning a holiday around travelling somewhere remote enough to have one. The stars haven’t gone anywhere, we just can’t see them. We’re looking at the same sky Van Gogh looked at. He kept painting it, and wrote to his brother Theo: “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”
Six years of shooting and editing, at a level I’d put somewhere just past amateur, has made me much less rigid about the technical side of all this. The exposure triangle matters and you should understand it, but it isn’t scripture. Modern cameras leave you plenty of room and editing software leaves you more. Editing is part of photography now, and mine has gone from Snapseed to Photoshop Express to Lightroom Mobile. My rule for editing is that nothing is off limits. I’ll push an image as far as it takes, and when I like what’s on the screen it’s finished. The photograph is for me first and everyone else after.
The gap I still can’t close is between what I see and what the camera records. Recently I took some friends to a winding mountain road, put them at the top and rode towards them from the other side. I had the whole photograph in my head before I set off. Since I was the one on the bike, they had to shoot it, first on the iPhone 17 Pro and then with the 55–200 on the Fuji. Nothing came close to what I’d pictured. The camera can only record what’s actually there. My brain is much more generous.
That’s also why I still carry the Fuji instead of relying on the phone. A pigeon sat near my window recently and I assumed the iPhone would be enough. It gave me the detail, but the camera was sitting an arm’s length away and I knew it would do better. Apps like Reeflex give you all the control you want on a phone. What they can’t give you is a 200mm lens in front of an APS-C sensor, so I tried again with the 55–200. At 200mm the bird was already filling the middle of the frame and the first one was bang on. All Lightroom did after that was turn it portrait, sharpen the eye and grade the colour. Phone cameras keep getting better and I’ll say that gladly, but anyone claiming the latest iPhone beats a proper camera with a prime on it hasn’t used both and isn’t someone I’d take seriously.
Photography is one of those hobbies where quality tracks fairly closely with what you’re willing to spend. Editing software gets better every year and the AI tools seem to improve by the week, already a long way from the Snapseed edits I was doing in 2020. All of it still works on whatever came off the sensor. Nothing recovers detail that was never captured. Capturing it takes good glass, and good glass isn’t cheap.
My X-T30 has taken a beating. It’s slowly falling apart and I’m fairly certain I’ll be replacing it within a year. This is the camera that got me started, and it has been strapped to motorcycles across most of the places I’ve photographed without once failing me when it mattered. If Fuji took this body, kept everything I love about it and dropped in the newer 40MP sensor, I’d use it forever.
I’m too far into the system to switch now. Some of the newer Sonys look good but I’d still buy the X-T5. When this one finally goes, that’s what I’ll order, and I’ll probably order it without holding it first.
