100X100 – episode 20

So glad to escape form my desk for an hour or two! Today we had a cold and windy but also rather sunny day: ideal to make the hop to a nearby recreation ‘park’, a former clay pit turned into a not-too-fashioned collection of ponds, trails, sports facilities and event areas. And the X100 came along – of course.

That little camera handles wide dynamic range situations oh so well! Its RAW files leave plenty of room for adjustment to match your memorized impression or any other creative rendering. And the latest Lightroom spin (a.k.a. beta 4) brings new strings to pull. That doesn’t just sound like fun: it is!

If you know your way around the 185 acre terrain, you can find some relics of the brick making industry that thrived in this area for centuries, until it mostly died in the seventies. Rust and dust, tones and structures: time to fire up some of the usual post-processing plug-ins!

And finally, none of these posts will do without a square and/or black&white image… Here we go!

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100, Lightroom 4 beta, Nik Color Efex Pro 4

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All the best to you!

I wish all you visitors to this humble blog a great 2012, loaded with exciting photo opportunities and rewarding pictures.

And, as the year’s start is rumored to come with lots of product announcements and will lead to another Photokina anyway, a healthy wallet should come handy as well…

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100X100 – episode 19

If you capture live performances of popular music, the sound of your camera’s shutter may not be your greatest concern. Stage illumination, freezing movement in low light, critical focus… will be more than enough to keep you busy and worried.

Shooting pictures during a classical music performance is very different. No one should behave so rudely as to disturb quiet passages or spoil intimistic movements with the clicks and whirs of the focal plane shutters common to DSLRs. In practice, that means that your picture options are restricted to those moments immediately before and after the actual playing. At best, for concerts with large orchestras and/or choirs, you might get away with a distant shot during the fortissimos.

Not so with the Fujifilm X100! That little gem comes equipped with an almost totally silent leaf shutter (as long as you disable the optional electronic shutter ‘sounds’). So silent even that once in a while you will wonder whether you actually just took a picture, or not. Add to that an f/2.0 lens of exceptional optical quality and great high ISO image quality and color rendition, and there’s your go-to hero when things go classic.

I recently was asked to cover a series of small, intimate concerts featuring contemporary vocal, piano, chamber and choral music. Allowing me to put my full-frame D700 (with standard and tele zooms) aside and give two radio-triggered SB-800’s some rest, my X100 proved perfect for capturing the actual performances using available light only.

Obviously, the X100’s wide-angle field-of-view (equivalent to a 35mm lens full-frame) is not ideal when your discrete shooting position is constrained to the back and sides of the theater. But then again, 12 great megapixels leave ample room for some careful cropping.

All images shown here were shot handheld at ISO 1600, using f/2.0 or f/2.8 as aperture, and with shutter speeds between 1/20s and 1/60s.

Another outstanding performance by the little one!

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100

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