X100s Pics

Here are a few pictures I took with the Fujifilm X100s before it broke.

X100s Woes and More Waiting

I was thrilled to get my Fuji X100s a couple of weeks ago. Charged the battery, formatted the SD cards and started learning how to use the camera. It's a fantastic camera and I played around with it for awhile. Took some pictures of the grandkids a few days after I got it and it did a couple of funny things just before I came home. Then it wouldn't turn on. Thought the battery was dead and put a different one into it. Eventually it started up again. The next day when I turned it on, it had reset. I had to enter the language, date, time, etc. although my custom settings were still there. Used it a couple of days later for awhile and then it shut down and that was it. So it has been returned and now I'm on the wait list for a replacement. I think I'm at the top of the list, but I'm back to patiently waiting for this gem. Hopefully, the next one will be completely problem free.

Waiting for the Fuji X100s

This is a beginning effort to get back to blogging and relate it to my passion for photography that unfortunately has lagged a bit lately.

What has got me excited again is this gorgeous little Fujifilm X100s. I track the blogs of both David Hobby and Zack Arias but had just clicked past their reviews of this camera. I finally did read the review on Luminous Landscape by Nick Devlin and he linked to David's and Zack's reviews and I was hooked, hooked, hooked. I had been quite interested in the X100 when it came out a couple of years ago but the subsequent negative aspects kept me from biting at that time. I have been looking for awhile for a camera that was small enough to take with me everywhere, but that also produced the high quality images that I have grown accustomed to with my (now ancient but still great) Canon 30D and the L70-200IS zoom lens that I use and love. I had considered the G series in Canon but didn't really want to drop to the smaller sensor. I did buy a Lumix waterproof, shockproof point and shoot for my trips to Mexico the last couple of years and it was great for what I wanted it for. I thought I would be excited by the new Canon mirrorless camera but, meh, not really.

So why the Fuji? APS-C sensor, same size as on my Canon; great reviews; cool looking, an awesome viewfinder, optical and electronic, etc. Even a fixed 35mm equivalent lens has me excited about new possibilities, new ideas and all relate to some of the type of photography I have taken and want to take. Kind of street photography type pics, definitely candids. In short, it has reinvigorated my desire to shoot.

The only problem? Nobody has one. I ordered one on May 28 at The Camera Store in Calgary but no idea when they will get a new supply. It's been over three weeks since I ordered it. No other online stores have any, so I guess it's just a matter of being patient. Every time I open my email I'm hoping to see a message that my order has shipped but now we have floods in Calgary so who knows. I've got my extra batteries, lens hood and Lexar 32gb memory cards from Amazon already, they just need a camera to attach to.

Patience, patience, patience. In the meantime, I'll get this blog going again, figure out Google +, think about finally jumping into Lightroom and just wait and dream and wait and wait, hopefully for not too much longer. C'mon Fuji, get those cameras made! Hopefully it won't be as endless and as in vain as in Waiting For Godot.

Hazy Hills

Still playing with this blog, too busy to post very often but I just recently printed this picture out in A3 size and have it hanging in my room.

I took it on August 31 from my son's deck in Vernon. The haze is from a forest fire that was burning in the Kamloops area and the wind had drifted it all through the Okanagan.

I converted it to black and white and then used the duotone feature in Photoshop. This is actually a quadtone.

What I like about it? The simple lines and the overall look with the hills just visible through the haze. The one thing I don't think I like? The gap between the trees and the bushes. My eye goes to that gap.

I shot it using my 70-200 Canon lens at 200mm and 1/500 @ f7.1, ISO 125. Taken about 2:00 in the afternoon.

*It does make a nice new header picture, though.*

October Wallpaper

Well, it's been awhile since I posted on this blog no one reads, but I have been to Ontario for my son's wedding at the end of July, back to work for a month and then my 22 days off that just ended. I haven't had much time to do much. I had a lot of photos to process from the wedding week and then just seem to have been busy.

I never made a September wallpaper and it seems a little bit late to do so but here is one for October that I took recently from the deck at my son's place in Vernon. I thought the clouds were pretty cool. A 1000x667 size can be found in this album.

Here's a funny mistake I made while working on this picture. I cropped it to 1000x667 and Photoshop took forever to do it. I was annoyed at the program or the computer, whatever was causing the lengthy delay. I left the computer and let it do it's thing and came back a while later and it was finished. But, it was huge and I'm going "d'oh, what did I do?" I checked the settings and had forgot to change it to pixels from inches so it create this multi-gigabyte file that was 1000 inches by 667 inches. No wonder it took so long. I fixed it up and it cropped in it's usual fast time and I was just laughing at myself. It wasn't the computer, or the program but the operator. Oh well, live and learn.

RAW and B&W Shooting

My passion for black and white is growing in leaps and bounds. From landscapes to people to anything, I am experimenting with it and trying to learn as much as I can about it and about printing because that is the final output which is more gratifying to me than simply posting on the net.

One thing that most experts agree on is that you should shoot in color and convert to black and white in Photoshop or whatever image manipulation program one uses. That way, all the data is there and this allows for greater flexibility when converting to black and white.

What had me a bit perplexed (just a bit) is how that relates to shooting in RAW. Most cameras have the option to shoot in black and white but, in my mind, if you shoot in RAW that shouldn't make any difference except that the picture you see on you camera screen would be black and white. I'm thinking that this could be a good thing because it would give you an idea of what the image would look like in black and white. But, since RAW captures everything it seemed to me that when you brought it into your software, it would be in color and you would still need to convert although I have never read this anywhere.

So, I went out this evening and gave it a try. I put the camera in black and white mode (still in RAW) and took a bunch of shots of whatever was between here and the video store we walked to in order to return a movie. The screen of the camera showed the pictures in black and white. When I got home I imported the movies into Adobe Bridge and when they came up, as I thought, they were in color.

Just a note here for those who shoot in JPEG, this won't work since the camera converts the RAW file in its own software according to what mode you tell it to, ie. black and white.

This presents an interesting option when I am planning to shoot specifically for black and white conversion because now the viewfinder can give me a general idea of what the final conversion might look like.

Above are two of the shots I took on my little walk and converted to black and white. After conversion, I then use the quadtone option in Photoshop to give a richer look to the image. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. I also convert using the black and white adjustment layer. The pictures are within 2 1/2 blocks of where I live. On the surface, a boring area but with, I think, some interest to be found. All in all, it was a good exercise and, though I didn't care about what I captured, I ended up with these two shots that I kind of like.

August Wallpaper

Whew! It has been a busy month since I last posted. I spent a lot of time working on a slide show for my son's wedding to his new bride. The show had 400 plus photos and was about 15 minutes long. I used a new program and it was just very time consuming. In fact, I finished it up about 2:00 a.m. on the day of the wedding/reception.

Of course, my wife and I also traveled to Ontario for the wedding and included a visit with my brother and his family in Oshawa before moving on to Peterborough for the wedding festivities.

I grabbed this picture just after we got off the commuter train in Oshawa. 12 of us had travelled to Toronto for a Blue Jays game as part of a stag party for my son. I thought it would make a good August wallpaper.

1/1000 at f5.6, ISO 100, 72 mm focal length, processed in Topaz Adjust for the HDR look.