Short trip to Paris resulted in frostbite! I spent a few days in Paris recently and it was cold! Occasional snow showers, and I tried to shoot the back of Notre Dame, but the cold got the better of me. I did get this: Fuji x100s, hand held, while walking through La Défense, a suburb of Paris. More to...
read moreI finally did it! I sold my Nikon D800E! I no longer have a Nikon camera. After over 20 years of shooting Nikons, I’ve finally switched out. A huge decision, but one that wasn’t made in haste (Click on images to zoom in). It all started in July 2013 when I bought a Fuji X100s. Apart from being a gorgeous camera, it has amazing image quality and portability. I’ve been babbling on about it on these pages for a while. For what I shoot, when I shoot, it does a fantastic job. I recently printed the final image from this post on...
read moreA trip to Sydney is a travelling photographers treat. You have the iconic opera house, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Central Business District, lots of neocolonial buildings, a multicultural society – just about everything you could wish for. Except time! I’m on a trip, part of the day job and I have a couple of free hours to make some images. It’s just not fair! I’ve been to Sydney before, so at least I’ve got some idea of what to expect, but time is so tight I’m preplanning a shot and hoping it...
read moreI had a spare hour on this trip to Perth and I knew I wanted to attempt to get a shot of one of the local icons. If you go to one of my favourite travel research sites, 500px.com and search on Perth, sort by rating, you see a ton of pictures of this boat house on the Swan river. It’s been shot a lot, and I’m not going to get anything radically new, but I’d still like to pay homage and add it to my collection. I’m out with my minimalist kit, so working with some limitations, but I know what I have in mind. I take a...
read moreA few months back I picked up the WCL-X100 for my Fuji x100s. This is the wide angle teleconverter that takes the built in lens from 35mm to 28mm equivalent focal length. Surprisingly, the maximum aperture of f2.0 is maintained, although whether through misdirection or skullduggery on the part of the manufacturer I will leave to people who care. I haven’t had much of a chance to use the converter in anger, with the day job taking precedence, but on the rare occasion I did play with it, it seems to do well enough. I knew I would have to...
read moreSitting on a plane, heading to Beijing for my day job, I’ve had an opportunity to think about my kit and what I’m hoping to accomplish in the (very) limited spare time available. I used to take a full 35mm kit with me on trips like this. A bag weighing in at 30lbs with 3 hefty 2.8 zooms, a prime, tripod, full frame body, laptop, ipad, backup batteries, filters, sundries…. There were trips where I never even took the camera out of the bag. I hauled it half way around the world for nothing! Work pressures meant I saw the...
read moreFollowing on from my last post about Cactus v6 triggers, I has some comments about using my existing PW setup as power controlling triggers instead of basic radio triggers. My focus before was using an old SB-26 with the Cactus triggers, so I didn’t play much with my PocketWizard FlexTTL5 and MiniTT1 for Nikon triggers. A comment on the last post said that if I held down the learn/test button for 5 seconds, it would set the triggers to basic mode. Unfortunately, with the latest firmware loaded (3.4) this doesn’t happen. All the...
read moreI’ve been playing with options for triggering off camera flashes recently, trying to find an optimal solution that works with my x100s. I’m a big fan of off camera flash, having discovered Strobist back in ’09. David Hobby completely changed my attitude to using flash, making it way more fun than I ever thought possible. I have a Nikon kit, with multiple SB 800 flash guns. It took me a while to find my comfort zone with the system, having been to a Joe McNally event and the Flashbus tour event. I won’t go into the TTL...
read moreGetting older. Inevitable consequence of life, like taxes. I’ve read a lot of reviews by people waning nostalgic about the X100s and how they feel like it enables “proper” photography, slowing down due to it’s quirks, forcing more thought. All true, but for me, getting older means I can’t see quite as well as I could, and that is as irritating as fire-ants inside a bathing suit. I love my D800, but nailing focus in portraiture is about getting the eye in focus. My absolute favourite lens for this is the Nikkor...
read moreThis post I’m totally geeking out. Last post I had a couple of questions about the Heliopan 10 stop filter in my stack, concerning colour cast and was it worth the cash? This isn’t a comparative review, because I don’t have another 10 stop filter to compare it to, so I thought I’d compare it to not using it. I threw in a comparison to the built in 3 stop filter of the x100s for good measure. 10 stop filters are notorious for adding strange colour shifts which can be a bear to fix in post. I bought the Heliopan in the...
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