Friday, December 21, 2018

Experimenting

I spent this morning having some fun with the X-T3 and experimenting with some film simulations. I went down to Port Adelaide to take a few shots of the old wool stores. I then took a couple of abstract reflections in the main street before heading to the beach at Semaphore.

I bracketed my shots to simultaneously take a Raw file as well as three Jpegs - in Provia, Astia and Classic Chrome simulations. After looking at all the files in Lightroom my conclusions were:

  1. Of the three film simulations I preferred Classic Chrome, not just for the industrial shots as I would have expected but also for the abstract and even the beach shots. The colours in the other two simulations were, to my eye, too vibrant.
  2. Straight out of the camera the Jpegs were, unsurprisingly, sharper and more 'finished'. What was surprising was how much extra time and effort was required in Lightroom to get the Raw files to look as good as the Jpegs. In no case was I able to process the Raw file to look better than the minimally adjusted Jpegs.
  3. It seems from this limited experimenting that if the exposure is good in camera and that the dynamic range does not require major work on the shadows and highlights, then the Jpeg files are perfectly adequate for screen reproduction. I can't see any reason why they should not be adequate for most printing.
Anyway here are three straight from the camera Jpegs with very minimal, if any, post processing.




Thursday, December 6, 2018

First Shoot with X-T3

A very short shoot under a high, hot sun at Glenelg. The main purpose was to just get a feel of the X-T3 in my hand. It certainly felt different to my Nikon D7200 and will take a while to feel completely comfortable. It was also strange to be shooting with the 23mm f2 lens rather than the 18-200mm lens on my Nikon.

The other purpose was to try the jpeg film simulations. I suspect it will take even longer to get comfortable with these. I'm certainly not about to forego my raw files yet.

Here are a few 'wide' beach shots.




A couple of people in action 



A couple of jetty shadows



and even an in-camera panorama - I think this feature might get quite a bit of use





Friday, November 30, 2018

Reboot - part 2

As if the trip, the book and the revamped web presence wasn't enough -

Yes, I bought a new camera. In fact after ten years I have ditched my Nikon DSLRs and moved over to the Fuji mirrorless system.

In addition to the body I got a 23mm f2 lens for everyday walking around, a 50mm f2 for portraits and a 55-200mm f3.5-4.8 for those occasions where a zoom is needed.

Why the change. Essentially it was the result of seeing the Fuji X-T3 in action while in Iran. Size and weight were considerations as was ease of use. Most important, however, were the benefits of the mirrorless system and the EVF in shooting at night. The ability to see what you are going to get in advance was so superior to the clumsy number of 'test' shots required with the DSLR.

It will also be fun. and challenging, to shoot with prime lenses after years of only using zooms.

Reboot

Our recent trip to Iran was like pushing the reboot button on my photography.

First there was the trip itself. The first ten days were spent on a dedicated photography tour organised by Pics of Asia. Following that we spent another ten days on our own travelling through this amazing country.

I returned home energised. In addition to the usual photo book I produce for each of our trips I completely revamped my website. Previously using Zenfolio I switched to using Adobe Portfolio. While some design aspects are more limited its integration with Lightroom made it an easy choice. While the site itself can not incorporate a blog, a link to this site doesn't seem to be too big a problem.

I also decided to use Adobe Spark to tell the photographic story of some aspects of our recent trip -
A more complete selection of photos can be seen on my website.