Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Fuji X-Pro2
When DXO Photo Lab 5 was released a few weeks ago, it came as a pleasant surprise to many that they had finally decided to support Fuji cameras. Fujifilm support is currently in beta, but the software is capable of producing some really good results. However, to get the best quality, you need to jump through a few hoops first. In this article, I’ll talk you through how to get the best results and some of the options you need to consider.
My X-Pro 2 is not well. I went out to shoot some autumn scenes with it a few weeks ago, and after taking about 20 photos, the camera started acting weird. The screen started breaking up and then the camera completely froze. I couldn’t even turn it off, and I had to take the battery out. I left it out for a little while and put it back in and it worked again for another 10 shots or so, then it started again.
I was passing through a very sunny London city twice over the last week. On each occasion, I was only there for a day or so, and so I didn’t have a lot of time for photography, but I still managed to squeeze an hour or two in on both trips. I hadn’t really intended to shoot street photography specifically, but it sort of ended up that way. I was originally planning to do more “travel photography” style shots, and I was also shooting a video for my new travel vlog series, but in the process of trying to avoid the typical shots of London everyone takes, I somehow ended up shooting street photography. I was actually really lucky with some of the shots too.
For a while now, I’ve been running a series of posts here on this blog called “Street Photo Diary”. I’ve also been practicing and testing various setups to allow me to produce “Vlog” style videos. After much testing and messing up, I have finally come up with a reasonable setup and idea, and that is to make a video version of my “Street Photo Diary” series. And so, a new monthly (for now) video series is born, also called “Street Photo Diary” !
There is a pretty amazing exhibit on in Dublin Zoo at the moment. The “Wild Lights” experience, is an art show of sorts, featuring animal shaped lanterns which are all around the zoo, mimicking a real zoo experience, only in lights. The artwork was created by a group of china artists, and is really something to behold. My wife and I recently paid a visit to see the exhibit and it was amazing.
As part of my ongoing Fuji Jpeg book project (which is progressing - but still a little bit away) I recently set about working on some recipes for getting various looks. One of the main things I wanted to try, was to see if I could get something similar to “street pan” in look. This is a type of film that gives you high contrast black and white and is a popular “look” with photographers who shoot street photography on film.
I’ve mentioned before about how much of a fan I am of Macphun’s Luminar, but that I prefer using as a plug-in rather than with raw files. However, there is one exception to that, and that is when I use it with DNGs created by Iridient X-Transformer. In that case the results are actually really great, so I made a little video to demonstrate.
I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends Hasselblad, and so in order to make the most out of it, I headed to one of my favourite places in the country, Glendalough. I haven’t shot with a medium format film camera before, and I didn’t want to waste too much film, so I brought my X-Pro2 with me aswell, and actually ended up shooting most of the images on that.
With all the fuss recently about the Sony A9 and its electronic shutter, I thought I would try out the one on my X-Pro 2. I had dabbled with it before, but I always thought it was a bit of an odd experience, so I didn’t really do much with it. I had also read various reports of it introducing rolling shutter effects, so I hadn’t payed it much attention. However, I was out doing some street photography the other day, and so I thought that I might as well give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
It was a beautiful spring day in Dublin today, so I went for a walk through the park to shoot the cherry blossoms with my Fuji X-Pro 2. I also wanted to try out something new, (well, technically old), that I got, so I filmed the whole thing. I acquired an old GoPro (first generation) so I decided to do a kind of Vlog style (kind of) video and I so I set about recording my progress with a GoPro mounted on the Camera’s hot shoe.
I wanted to wrap up the street photography video series I’ve been sharing over the past few days with one final post, where you can see the finished images. These are some of the actual images the I edited in the second part of the video, as well as a few more that I didn’t cover.
The other day, the temperature dropped down below zero for the first time this year. The air was cold and fresh, and you could feel the icy hands of winter on your skin. The winter sky is clear and blue, and the low sun gives the illusion of warmth, but you can almost see the invisible iciness in the air.
A while ago I wrote a post about the settings that I use on My X-E1. In that piece I mostly covered the Jpeg settings that I used on the camera such as the shadow and highlight tone and so on. Since then I’ve moved to an X-Pro 2, and recently a reader gave me the idea of doing a follow up article to talk about the settings that I use on my X-Pro 2, so In this post, I’ll talk again about the image settings, but also about some of the other camera options that I have set.
Affinity Photo is one of the more interesting Photoshop competitors out there, and it has a powerful feature set. I find myself using it more and more for various tasks, and its speed makes it a very useful software tool to have in your arsenal. The software has its own raw processing engine, and while it hasn’t ben updated to include X-Pro 2 support yet, you can still open and edit X-Pro 2 raw files with the software thanks to a semi hidden feature.
Apple has finally added RAW support for the Fuji X-Pro 2 to Mac OS X. The latest Digital Camera Raw Update released yesterday adds support for just two cameras, the Fuji X-Pro 2 and the Pentax K-7. It’s taken a while for X-Pro 2 support to come to Apple’s system level Raw services, but you should now be able to use X-Pro2 Raw files in software that uses that service, such as Photos, Affinity Photo or Aperture
It was a beautiful sunny Autumn morning here in Dublin last Sunday, and so I set about doing something I had wanted to do for a while, but I had kept putting off for various reasons. When I saw the beautiful light, I decided to head out and shoot some video (semi-properly) on my Fuji X-Pro 2. I had shot some clips before, but I hadn’t set out to do a proper shoot. For this test, I wanted to try and shoot reasonably properly, so I took my tripod, and more importantly, a proper variable ND filter. While I had a few hiccups, for the most part I’m happy with what I shot.
Because we’re pretty terrible at looking after plants, and because everything we plant usually dies, we’ve been looking for ways to decorate our balcony without condemning some poor flowers to their untimely ends. So my wife came up with the ingenious idea of creating a garden out of windmills. I was sceptical at first, but now that I’ve seen the finished product, I’m really impressed.
In one of my earlier X-Pro 2 diary entries I pointed out an issue that I was having with the X-Pro 2 and using auto focus on small objects in a scene or objects close to the camera. The camera’s autofocus would refuse to lock on to smaller objects such as flowers and so on, and instead it would focus on the background. At the time, I wrote that it was probably something that I was doing wrong. Well, I’ve been trying a lot of things and I finally found the solution
