My 2 Years Journey with Fujifilm

I started photography with a Canon PowerShot G12, followed by G1X and later EOS 50D. As time goes by, my photography hobby was sort of like on the edge of giving up as I just don’t feel like going out and shoot with my gears anymore. The issue is mainly due to the heavy gears and also I’m not joining many local community to go out and practice photography.

After much consideration and observation on the camera released by Fujifilm, such as X100 and X-Pro1, in December 2013, I bought the Fujifilm X-E2 to replace my whole Canon system. I must say getting the Fujifilm camera has reignited the joy and passion for photography, and I believe many would agree with me on this. The reason I jumped into Fujifilm is simple: the rangefinder design, compact and light weight system paired with the small prime lenses, the intuitive control layout and the film simulation which gave them the best JPEG output in the camera market.

Later on I got myself the X100S as my “everyday camera”, but sadly ended up selling it after few months of usage. I’m fine with it’s “compactness”, but the deal breaker for me was the camera’s operation was rather slow, and it’s actually different as compared to my X-E2 (AF switch button is at the opposite direction, for example). It’s frustrating and irritating at the same time. Not to mention the lens was soft at wide open and I need to constantly stop down in order to get better sharpness. I’m not saying it’s a bad camera, it still performs pretty well in general when you work within it’s limitation. But I have to say I bought it on impulse, and after much consideration, it just doesn’t suit my requirement.

The X-T1, which was a SLR designed camera, was released later on and I traded my X-E2 for it. It’s a fine camera that packed a whole punch of features and technologies inside. However, at this point of time, competitors had already catch up with the like of Sony releasing their A7 lineup. Fujifilm is no longer the only player, and others were catching up in a fast pace and even surpassing them in many areas. For me, I still like shooting with Fujifilm camera, and I love the lenses that I owned such as the XF18, XF23 and XF56. Even though X-T1 is not as feature rich as others, the price is not that cheap either, but I still decided to stick with it as I enjoyed shooting with it.

But ever since the release of X-T1, the lens lineup for Fujifilm has changed quite a bit. The coming lenses like XF16, XF18-135, XF16-55, XF50-140 are all huge and bulky. Even though they are “optically superb” and weather sealed, these lenses just don’t fit into my requirement. Well, to be fair I already owned all the focal lengths I needed, but it just made me feel that Fujifilm has forgotten it’s “roots and heritage” of releasing compact system camera with small and superb lenses. I’m not against Fujifilm from releasing their “pro” line of lenses, but it’s just that at the same time I felt that my needs for a compact and light weight system has been abandoned by them. Later on, I got myself the X-Pro1 as a second body to shoot for my trip in Japan. I wrote about it in my previous posting that there are a lot to like and hate about this camera, and this is where I found myself in a dilemma.

I had always fascinate about shooting with a rangefinder camera. In many ways, I enjoyed shooting with the X-Pro1 more than the X-T1, but the performance of it leaves much to be desire. X-Pro2 is no where to be seen, and on a side track I got a taste of what real rangefinder is like after I acquired the Leica M9-P. The optical viewfinder on X-Pro1, although beautiful as it is, it just isn’t a rangefinder no matter how much it tries to disguise. Perhaps it’s just me who can’t work with the optical viewfinder of X-Pro1, but I believe most if not all are using it with electronic viewfinder instead, which defeats the purpose of having it there in the first place. X-Pro1 ended up as the second most short lived camera for me. It’s a shame, really. As a camera it sure offers a lot of great user experience, but being a flagship that contains specification that is even lower than current entry level, it simply makes no sense to pay for the premium price for it unless you are buying used or in dirt cheap promotion price.

And there came a chance for me to shoot for my friend’s wedding, and I decided to shoot with the X-T1. I loaned the XF16-55 and XF56 APD from Fujifilm Singapore and shot the wedding day with it. This was the first time I shoot for a wedding, and I had made a couple of mistakes throughout and ended up not getting results that I wanted. But when I looked back, the performance of the whole system is still… has a lot of room for improvement. I have been shooting for hobby all this while, hence such issue never surfaced to me before. But once I get myself into the run and gun situation, how I wished I have a DSLR with me. “DSLR is dead”, that’s what mirrorless users loved to say. I can assure that they are completely wrong and DSLR will stay relevant at least for now.

The AF system for X series camera is still unreliable at times. The focusing speed is reasonable, but the accuracy is what frustrate me most. The dynamic range for the sensor is still limited compared to competitors. When underexposed, there’s little room to pull back the shadow without introducing noise. And I still can’t find a good way to process the raw files of Fujifilm. Some of these issues can be my own problem, but when I can harvest better result with the same process with other camera, it makes me wonder why I need to torture myself for it. In the end, I had been shooting and using Fujifilm’s JPEG files most of the time.

Keeping the X-T1 also means that I need to continue to keep a whole lens line up just for it. As my M mount lens will not be in the same focal length when I adapt them on it due to the sensor crop factor. As my goal has always about downsizing and streamlining my gear, I had made the hard decision to sell off my whole Fujifilm system. Yes, it’s a hard decision. I try not to hop around systems too much but when things aren’t work out for me anymore, is time to let go. Emotionally I’m still attached with Fujifilm’s camera, even those from Canon. Canon cameras had nurtured my photography basics for 3 years, while Fujifilm cameras had accompanied me through the learning and growing phase for another 2 years. As much as I’m being objective and not bias to any brand, I can’t helped but to get a some emotional attachment to the things I used.

At this point of time, the Sony A7 series  camera seems to be a good fit to streamline my equipment as I can literally use the same lenses I used on my M-P on them, hence I’ll be shooting with them and knowing them better. But I still feel that something is missing on the A7 series which is decisive enough to hold me from jumping into it. Perhaps it is “soulless” like what many others are saying. I’ll continue to keep a lookout as I’m not in a hurry to expand my current line up. I should be able to live with my M-P and the four lenses I have for quite awhile. There’s still a X30 lying around in my house as it belongs to my girlfriend, so I can still technically shoot with a Fujifilm camera whenever I want to.

Goodbye Fujifilm. I really enjoyed using your camera, but as time goes by, it seems like we have parted in our directions, philosophies and goals, hence I have no choice but to let you go. Hopefully someday you will be able to wow me again with a great camera like how the X-Pro1 did in the year of 2012, and I will be more than happy to embrace you again. Till then.

Year in Review 2015

This is going to be a long post to close the year of 2015, so please bear with me. This year marks the 5th year of my photography journey, and this year has been a roller coaster ride for me. A lot of changes in terms of gear that I’m using, and there are a lot of things that I learnt throughout the year.

This year, I managed to get a real taste of shooting with a “real” film camera… the Nikon FM3A. I shot quite a number of rolls ranging from colour film such as Kodak Gold 200 and Pro 400H, to black & white film such as BW400CN, T-Max 400 and Neopan Across 100. The experience of shooting with film camera has been very enjoyable, and I get to understand more on the roots of photography, like how the classic metering system works, manual focusing, focus and recompose and so on. I also get to appreciate different types of film and their output, and to train myself to become more precise in executing a shot before triggering the shutter. Eventually, I have sold the camera off and yes I’m regretting on this decision.

The year of 2015 marks the beginning of my journey through the world of rangefinder. I’d always been curious and eager to try out a rangefinder, but the price of the camera has always put me off. It’s not cheap and I don’t feel comfortable to just asked for one from my friend to try and shoot for a period of time. There came the opportunity for me to buy over a Leica M9-P from my friend at a very attractive price. I bought it over, battled my way with the rangefinder and eventually fell in love with it. Later on, I decided that I “need” the better performance from the new Leica M Type 240, and so ended up selling the M9-P and got myself the Leica M-P Type 240. Actually both are brilliant cameras, but I’ll talk about it a little more next time on the story surrounding this change.

And last but not least… the year of 2015 also marks the end of my 2 years journey with Fujifilm cameras. Yes, from X-E2 to X100S, from X-Pro1 to X-T1… I have sold them all (technically speaking I still have a X30, which belongs to my girlfriend). There are many reasons why I decided to do so. I still can’t seems to harvest all the greatness of Fujifilm RAW files, and the fact that new lenses are getting bigger and heavier were a big let down to me as well. Of course there are many other things which brought me to this decision, but most of them are just my personal opinion. I’ll talk about those next time in a separate post. For now, the only Fujifilm camera left that I might still be shooting with will be the X30.

Gears aside, I’m glad that I’d been shooting more frequent than the year before. Almost every weekend or every other weekend I’m out to shoot, to learn more about my camera, to practice more about what I have read from books or forum and to see things and visualize them in different perspective. Perhaps I’d planned too many projects with too little time to complete them. Anyway, I managed to complete a couple of small projects like the “50 Shots with my Zeiss Planar” and “Goodbye 74 to 80 Commonwealth Drive”. The “to do” list is still pretty long, and I’ll see what can be done in the year of 2016 to materialize them.

The year of 2015 has been a fruitful year in terms of traveling and photography. I managed to cover Japan (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Nara), Hong Kong and Cambodia (Phnom Penh), and I’m glad that I managed to grab some shots that I like from these trips. It’s always nice to be able to travel to some foreign places, it feels refreshing and gets you excited and wanted to just go out all the time to look, see, experience and shoot.

So what’s there for 2016? For a start, I’m planning to revamp my flickr account, though I’m not too sure how to do it, I’ll just try and see if I can keep them organized better. Blog post will continue over here, and I’m actually planning to shoot lesser for 2016. I’m toying the idea of revisiting my archive of images and relook into some of the forgotten gems and process them all over again. I have not been improving much in terms of post processing, hence I would certainly hope I can do something about it in 2016. Photo project wise, I’ll be downsizing and only be selecting a few projects that I’m really keen to work on. And last but not least, a lot of money has been spent on gears in 2015, so for 2016, I would like to spend more on developing my skills instead. I’ll probably grab some useful books or attend some workshops, we’ll see how everything unfolds. Besides that, hopefully I can embark on a solo trip as well for next year.

Gear wise, I don’t think there will be any major changes moving forward. It’s likely that I’ll grab a camera to replace my X-T1 as a AF-driven system alongside my Leica M System. Perhaps adding a film camera body if I can get something cheap to play with? Lens wise, at most I can foresee is getting a 28mm lens or “upgrading” one or two lenses in my current line-up. Otherwise, nothing much that I can think of for now. Oh well, we all know how the G.A.S. strikes out of nowhere, no one will be able to predict what camera you will be holding next anyway.

All in all, 2015 has been a pretty good year for me in terms of photography. I learnt a lot, get to know a lot of new friends and fellow photogs, get to explore more places and above all, get to take some nice pictures that I’m happy with. Hopefully 2016 will be another great year ahead for me and my photography. Till then, Happy New Year.

A Beginner’s Guide to Fujifilm X Series Camera – Focus Peaking

One of the advantages for using mirrorless camera (such as the Fujifilm X series camera body) is that you can easily adapt all sorts of lenses on the camera. From old Minolta lenses, Canon lenses, Leica lenses and so on. For those who owned a collection of vintage or manual focusing lenses such as Minolta lens, Leica lens or Zeiss lens, it is as good as breathing new life to their lens collection, as they get to use those lenses on the camera body via a simple mount adapter. There are people who adapt their DSLR lenses on mirrorless as well. Here’s a nice article about adapting lenses on mirrorless body:

http://admiringlight.com/blog/using-old-manual-focus-lenses-on-mirrorless-cameras/

Although you get to use all sorts of lenses on the Fujifilm X series camera body, however you will lose the ability to perform auto focus (well, of course) and one will need to rely on manual focus in order to get things done. It may sounds hard and troublesome, but actually it is pretty easy to be done as there are features such as focus peaking, digital split screen and magnification available on the Camera body which assist you in obtaining focus accurately.

Of all the manual focus aid, my preference is to use focus peaking. Generally speaking, focus peaking will show colour dot over the edge of your subject when it is in focus. This method holds true for most of the time. However, when you are shooting high contrast object, the edge will sometimes be fooled to show it is in focus with the peaking dot while in actual the subject is not yet in focus.

To work around this limitation, I find that instead of looking for the edge to show peaking dots, look for the depth of field. When you focus, you should be able to see peaking on certain distance/area/zone, that’s your depth of field/region where with your given setting, the subject falls within that region will be in focus. So you just turn the focus ring until that region covers your subject. By focusing this way, I found that my success rate is much higher.

When required, I’ll couple focus peaking with magnification to get the most precise focus. As for digital split image, I personally don’t find it useful for me to acquire focus easily. Hope this sharing will become useful for you.

A Beginner’s Guide to Fujifilm X Series Camera – User Preset Custom Settings

There’s this feature in Fujifilm X series camera which I believe is least being used by most. However, I find this feature to be a pretty useful feature which speed up my workflow. It’s called the “Custom Setting”. You can edit the custom setting by heading to menu, then scroll down and look for “edit/save custom setting”. From there you can edit and save your personal preferred setting individually for up to 7 custom settings.

Items that you can predefined in custom settings include:

ISO

Dynamic Range

Film Simulation

White Balance

Color

Sharpness

Highlight Tone

Shadow Tone

Noise Reduction

By now you may realized that these are the parameters that affect the in-camera JPEG processing. Hence, the custom setting is particularly useful for those who shoot JPEG only or RAW + JPEG. I have all 7 custom settings set to different film simulations, and for each film simulation I have a set of adjustment predefined. So when I want to shoot in Astia for example, all I need to do is press the Q button, select the custom setting that stored the film simulation and the adjustment profile, and I’m ready to start shooting. When I want to switch to another simulation, instead of pressing the short cut button on the D-pad, all I need to do is just press the Q and switch the custom settings.

Using the custom setting as a way to change your film simulation gives a few advantages:

1. It frees up the D-pad, so I can assign direct AF point adjustment function to it
2. I can ensure consistency on the output of my picture with certain style that I want (such as high contrast fir monochrome image and etc)
3. Faster workflow for JPEG shooting. Most of the shooting adjustment has already been predefined by you, and if there’s any changes required to be made in the field, it can be done easily and much faster (consider the fact that you may want to change more than one parameter)
4. Free up spaces in the Q menu. For camera which allows customization of Q menu, having some parameters predefined and stored in the custom setting allows you to remove those parameters from the Q menu and replace with something else. Hence, less hassle to dive into the menu system.

I hope I had brought my idea across… It’s not an easy topic to explain. Nevertheless, here are the 7 custom settings that I used in my X camera:

Custom 1:

ISO: Auto (200-6400)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Velvia

White Balance: Auto or 5600K

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: -1

Shadow Tone: -1

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 2:

ISO: Auto (200-6400)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Provia (Standard)

White Balance: Auto

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: -1

Shadow Tone: -1

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 3:

ISO: Auto (200-3200)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Pro Neg Hi

White Balance: Auto

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: -1

Shadow Tone: -1

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 4:

ISO: Auto (200-6400)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Monochrome

White Balance: Auto

Color: 0

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: +2

Shadow Tone: +2

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 5:

ISO: Auto (200-6400)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Monochrome + Red Filter

White Balance: Auto

Color: 0

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: +1

Shadow Tone: +2

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 6:

ISO: Auto (200-3200)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Astia

White Balance: Auto

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: -1

Shadow Tone: -1

Noise Reduction: -1

Custom 7:

ISO: Auto (200-6400)

Dynamic Range: Auto

Film Simulation: Classic Chrome

White Balance: Auto

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

Highlight Tone: -1

Shadow Tone: +1

Noise Reduction: -1

As such, I have remove items like colour, sharpness, highlight tone and shadow tone from the Q menu and replaced with other items such as flash control, face detection on/off and etc. you may also realized that for Astia and Pro Neg Hi, my ISO is limited to only 3200, which is the maximum acceptable ISO for shooting portrait in JPEG for me. Of course these are just some of my preference, and feel free to play around with those adjustment and find the best presets that suits your style.

 

P/S: If you are shooting RAW, this whole thing may not benefit you much at all. But I still find that it’s good to be able to view the picture when I shoot with my personal presets, as this give me an idea on how my picture will turn out in post processing as well.

 

Credits: This useful technique was first taught by X Photographer, Keith Low during one of his workshop. I have tweaked the settings to my own liking, which is slightly different from his sharing during the workshop.

A Beginner’s Guide to Fujifilm X Series Camera – Film Simulations

I’m not really an expert to discuss film simulation here. Anyway, here are a few links for you to read up and compare the difference between different film simulation:

http://www.fujivsfuji.com/film-simulation-modes-compared/

http://fujifilm-blog.com/tag/film-simulation/

For general shooting I’ll stick to Provia. Occasionally when I do streets or documentary kinda style, I’ll go for Monochrome or Classic Chrome. When shooting portraiture, my preference leans towards Pro Neg Hi or Astia. Well, these are just my “usual” preferences. Of course there are times when I’ll do the unusual such as shooting landscape in Monochrome + Red filter and etc. Velvia is not my preferred film simulation, somehow… Occasionally I’ll use it when I shoot landscape or nature, but most of the time I’ll end up toning down the colour saturation as often I just find them too overwhelming. Again, these are my preferences, do try out all the simulation and see which one works best for you.

If you shoot RAW, you can convert into different film simulation in-camera via the in-camera RAW converter. Otherwise, you can decide later in Photoshop or Lightroom when you import your RAW files (Note that you don’t get to change the film simulation if you import the Jpeg files). If you are shooting JPEG only and you are not sure which film simulation works best, what can be done? There’s this function in Drive Mode called “Film Simulation Bracketing”. Once activated, the same scene will be shot with 3 different film simulations that you have predefined. You can select the one that works for you later on.

Film simulation is one of the reason why I was lured to use Fujifilm camera. Hope you enjoy using it as much as I do. Till then.