Xboxes on a stroll

Finally back after a long period of… well, just no time for blogging. Luckily, that did not mean no chance to get out shooting (just almost no spare room for reviewing, processing etc.).

I took my X-cameras along on a full day of street photography in Brussels’ Marolles neighborhood, situated between the Law Courts of Brussels (the biggest building worldwide constructed in the 19th century) and the Brussels-South railway station. During the Middle Ages lepers were exiled to this area, where they were cared for by the nuns of Maria Colentes (Marikollen) – hence the origin of the area’s name.

In later centuries, the Marolles became a working class district, and in modern times even a laboratory for the construction of social housing. The neighborhood today is known for its social authenticity, as it houses a mix of generations and ethnicities.

Visitors and tourists will be attracted by the daily secondhand trade market on the ‘Vossenplein’ and by the many antiques in the surrounding streets. But if you venture a little further, there is much more to discover!

Not uncommon for street photography in general, I find this subject matter ideally suited to be captured in black and white. So these few selected shots got a good dose of Silver Efex Pro.

Gear notes: Fujifilm X-Pro1, Fujinon XF 35mm f/1.4 & 60mm f/2.4;
Fujifilm X100

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

Heavenly peace

Little or no blog activity for some time, but that doesn’t mean my cameras have been idle… Most projects though were not for public sharing.

A week ago, I had to kill some time in the beautiful city of Lier. As always my Fujifilm X100 was on my side, and we paid a quick visit to the small but exquisite beguinage. While founded in the year 1258, most surviving buildings on this UNESCO World Heritage Site date from the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Amazing how this place still remains an oasis of peace in the middle of an otherwise thriving city.

Meanwhile, I am (im)patiently waiting for the X-Pro1 to arrive…

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

As time goes by…

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I dearly love my Fujifilm X100. Since its arrival last May, that camera has brought me more photographic pleasure and satisfaction than I ever could have expected. I have no doubt that the X100 will remain my tool of choice when I am looking for simplicity and for shooting pictures for the fun of it.

There is also no doubt in my mind that my trusted D700 goes into the bag whenever I need to shoot dynamic action, a fast-paced event, or simply cannot afford to miss the golden shot. Or need a long tele, or capture ‘true’ macros. The D700 should not worry about being left in the dark too much. For what I plan to shoot in the coming months, I see no need to make a move to a D800 (although a D4 would be great, even a good used copy of a D3S).

But for a while now a new potential contender lurks around the corner. One that most likely will steal a lot of street time from the X100 – without replacing it completely. One that almost certainly will be picked up where otherwise I would have taken the D700.

I am talking about the new Fujifilm FinePix X-Pro1.

As soon as that camera was announced, I put in my pre-order for a body and all three of the initial prime lenses. There’s so much of the great X100 stuff I learned to love in the X-Pro1, and then some more. And unless something else is totally screwed up (and not being properly addressed promptly), I know I will like it a lot!

I was able to handle a pre-production X-Pro1 for some 20 minutes earlier this week, and it felt great. Late next week I should have another brief go at it. And then it will be another long wait until the black boxes arrive, hopefully around the end of the month.

I will be happy to share with you my adventures with the new X-kid on the blog, just like I did for the X100. As the old song goes:

“On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.”

Gear notes: “under construction”

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – epilog

At the end of May last year I received my Fujifilm FinePix X100, one of the first batch arriving in Belgium. The end of a long waiting period, as I first saw (and immediately fell for) that beautiful camera at the 2010 Photokina. It turned out to be a significant milestone, as the X100 has strongly influenced my photography ever since.

Within days I decided this camera is worth the effort of getting deeply acquainted with. It seemed and later proved to be a tool that will not simply adapt to whatever your shooting habits may be… The X100 opens up to a wealth of photographic pleasure and lots of creative stimuli, but only when you accept to explore and embrace its essence and particularities.

I decided to share my journey with the X100 on this blog. The result: twenty ‘100X100’ episodes that document my learning process, five images at a time. I also determined that I would not once put a 35mm prime on my D700 (my favorite street shooting combo at the time) before completing this X100 series.

And so I started growing into the X100 more and more. Light and compact to come along to any occasion. Clear and sharp from the hand and from the hip. Vibrant colors and smooth tones, whatever the lighting, dynamic range or ISO setting. Super quiet and unobtrusive, stealthy as needed. Simply said: a pure gem.

I relived the pleasure of letting the eye dominate the equipment. Somewhat forgotten, but never unlearned from the days that cameras were either simple and compact, or else  not affordable. Remembering to anticipate, reposition, preset and zone-focus.
To see before shooting, to capture without chimping. That joy!

The X100 also got me firmly back into ‘shooting’ black&white. Admitted, Nik’s wonderful Silver Efex Pro played a big role there too: that software allows me to dust off my tricks from the  darkroom past, as well as taking images past old frontiers.

That’s why, for this 100X100 epilog, I picked some of my favorite color shots from the series and spinned them through the B&W machine. Hope you enjoy!

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100, Silver Efex Pro

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

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

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

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

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – episode 18

The year’s end is coming near, and all the glossy lifestyle magazines bring plenty of ‘variations’ articles. Nine fresh ideas to dress the family dinner table. Five ways to mix a cocktail with gin. Three trendy preparations for fresh tuna. Four alternatives for the traditional Christmas chocolate trunk cake. And so on…

That variations theme led me to think about different ways to
‘interpret’ a single image in totally different ways. Not just sticking to whatever you had in mind as the shutter clicked, but a little creative exploration of different looks and moods. And what better and easier way to tackle this challenge than to randomly grab in the goodies bag offered by post-processing plug-in suites.

This is what my X100 ‘saw’ from the fifth floor hotel room balcony on a drab and windy Sunday morning. You’re looking at a part of downtown Breda, in the south of the Netherlands: the Chassé Promenade, with the Chassé Theater and the Holland Casino in the background (locals by now will know where I was staying).

Let’s start with a simple basic treatment in Lightroom. A little tweak of exposure and contrast, a pinch of clarity and vibrance, and a more interesting crop: that’s all.

Over to Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro: a tool I could hardly go without anymore by now. I ended up with this rather dramatic, dark and grainy look. As a matter of fact: this is the ‘look’ I had in mind when I took the picture.

Creativity can come in colors too: Nik’s latest Color Efex Pro 4.0 spoils you with stackable effect filters and selective blending.
For this one I combined one of the Cross Processing filters with a Bleach Bypass one; a few carefully placed control points were used to set each filter’s strength in specific areas.

 
You cannot let a cloudy sky and such concrete walls slip by without a try at HDR processing. The starting image in fact was the middle one of a three-frame bracketed series with –1EV, 0EV and +1EV exposures; that setting too was premeditated… Unfortunately, the X100 does not offer you a 2EV spacing option, more useful for HDR capture. The three frames were combined in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro. This time, I ignored my preference for a more realistic rendering and rather pushed for more. Here again, one or two control points and a little tweaking once back in Lightroom added some final touches.

Do these plug-ins, with their endless creative variations, make your pictures better? I will leave that for others to decide, but they do at least help me to look differently at my shots. And I will visualize a broader range of options when I next push the trigger.

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100 – Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – episode 17

A blessing or a curse?

So far I haven’t really made up my mind about the role and usefulness of ‘creative filters’ in post-processing. Sure, they are my go-to tools for B&W conversions and HDR processing, and I will use them without hesitation as long as their effect on the final image is subtle and seemingly non-existent. Based on that same logic, I will rarely include Photoshop in my workflow, except for ‘mandatory surgery’: I prefer staying within the capabilities and confines of Lightroom and its basic toolset.

And yet, having installed a fair selection of plug-ins for some time now, I find myself revisiting my original position. Photomatix Pro has become my workhorse for photorealistic HDR images, and Nik Software’s excellent suite serves me well for more artistic versions and interpretations.

For creative experimentation, I would have a hard time doing without Nik’s ‘Efex Pro’ triplet. It has become so easy to see a fast preview of any effect, thanks to the many built-in presets, and there’s ample sliders to tweak the processes to your personal liking. And then the luxury of the almighty U Points!

There’s one drawback in taking this route. Potentially, a big one. It is so easy and alluring to take an otherwise bland, uninspired shot and transform it into something ‘worth looking at’. Indeed, a trendy effect may make the picture look more interesting – at least to its author - than content or composition deserve. I note the same pitfall in so many iPhone snaps that litter Twitter and Facebook: often empty shells but coming in a nice gift wrapper.

On the other hand, creatively fooling around makes you wonder why an skipped discarded at first suddenly looks more promising, even takes on a new personality. Perhaps that brings us to a better look into composition and the use of light and color. And thereby teaches us a thing or two to make our next pictures a tad better. What do you think?

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100 – Silver Efex pro, Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – episode 16

There’s plenty of debate about the optimal aspect ratio for cameras. Do you prefer the 35mm film classic 3:2 proportions, or the old school video 4:3? Or do you long for 4x5 or 6x7 film ratios?

I for one find myself returning to a square image crop on a regular basis. probably a deeply rooted heritage from 6x6 analog film shooting days - or even 4x4, do you remember those tiny 127 format rolls?

So for this episode in my X100 saga, a choice of ‘square cuts’ from a recent  Belgiumdigital Shooting Day and from Scott Kelby’s PhotoWalk, both in Antwerp.

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – episode 15

Tone and structure… Two characteristics that may contribute to make an image more captivating and interesting. And even more so with black&white (con)versions.

Here’s a number of playful variations on shots taken during two separate strolls in Antwerp: a recent Belgiumdigital shooting day, and the local edition of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk.

Sittin’ on the dock of the bay…

Help!

Hope

Despair

What’s on tap?

B&W conversions using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version