I set myself a little project the other morning, and that was to venture around the streets of Dublin city looking for interesting colours I could see. It’s become something of a running gag now, that my “Street Photography” isn’t technically street photography. But then, the definition of street photography is so vague anyway, at this point it doesn’t really matter. It was an interesting exercise, and it was quite revealing to me.

I discovered the other day, quite by accident, that my Fuji X-Pro 2 is two years old this week. Tomorrow in fact. What a few years it has been. I’ve had ups and downs with the camera, but it’s also been good to me. Writing about it and processing Fuji files has undoubtedly made a name for me in certain corners, and I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if it hadn’t been for buying that camera.

This is another short excerpt from my latest eBook on working with Fujifilm Cameras. In Chapter 3 of "Fuji Jpegs: A Shooting and Processing Guide, " I cover a collection of tips to help you get your images as close as possible to what you want them to be in-camera. In the chapter, I point out that it’s important to understand that in many cases, a lot of what is “right” is subjective, and depends entirely on the look that you’re aiming to achieve. In the following excerpt, I discuss one of the side effects of using an EVF and why you need to be careful with your exposure.

It was a lovely sunny day in Dublin the other day, and it was surprisingly warm after a long cold spell. I grabbed my cameras and headed out to do some street and cityscape photography in the city. As well as trying to get some new street photography, I also wanted to shoot another episode of “Street Photo Diary”

One of the highly anticipated new features in the latest Firmware update for the X-Pro 2 was the addition of highlight clipping warning in Live view. While you could get the “blinkies” previously in playback, there was no option to see them in live view until now. After you install firmware 4.0, you still need to enable it in the menu in order to turn it on.

While it has been out for a little while now, I haven’t had a chance to try Fuji’s new X-Raw Studio application until quite recently. Part of this was because when it was initially released it didn’t support the X-Pro 2 (or rather the X-Pro 2 didn’t support it) and it was also partly because I have been pretty busy (and sick) and I just didn’t get around to it. Now that I have finally had a chance to test it out, here are my first impressions…

With the release of firmware 4.0, the Fuji X-Pro 2 now supports 4K video. I did some quick testing, recording some footage in some local parks. There is a mix of hand held and tripod. All was shot using ProNeg Standard as the film profile. There was some very light colour correction done in Final Cut Pro as well as a custom profile to give the footage a slight grade, but this was kept to a minimum. I didn’t stabilise or adjust the geometry of any footage, so as not to affect the detail. 

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.

Fuji Rumors has been detailing what they believe to be a major firmware update coming to the X-Pro2, possibly as soon as this week. The big feature slated to be announced is that Fuji will bring 4K video to the camera. I really hope this turns out to be true, and I will be delighted if it is the case. I do have a few other things that I would like to see along with the release too, so here is my relatively modest wish list.

I’ve recently been using some non Fuji lenses with my X-Pro 2 and the other day, I was trying out my old Nikon Macro lens with the camera. Despite being a macro, I had mostly been using it as a short telephoto, with its 105mm focal length being useful, especially as the 1.5X crop adds to the throw. However, over the weekend I got to use it as it was intended, for some macro work, and the results were pretty great.