Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in X-Pro2 Diary
For a while now there’s been something that I’ve been meaning to try in Capture One that I’ve never gotten around to, and that is to find some colour profiles for Fuji cameras. Unlike Lightroom, Capture One doesn’t include colour profiles for the Fuji film simulation modes. However, it does have a comprehensive colour matching engine, and many people have posted their own matching profiles.
When Capture One 10 was announced just before Christmas, I was very excited by the initial results that I saw with X-Pro 2 files, but I’ve realised now that my enthusiasm may have been over-rated. Since that time, I’ve been trying to lock down some base settings to use as the basis for some recommendations for my guide and to be honest I’ve had difficulty coming up with results that work for everything. It’s been a process of discovery, and I've learned some interesting things along the way. I’ve come up with some experimental settings, and I wanted to put them out there for people to try.
Capture one has long been a rival to Lightroom, and I’ve been suggesting its use for Fuji X-Trans shooters for some time. However, Capture One Pro 9 seemed to be lacking in the quality of its conversions for X-Pro2 users and there were a number of issues holding it back. Today, Phase One launched a new version, Capture One Pro 10, and I’m happy to say that those issues are gone.
This is pretty old news at this point, but as I hadn’t covered it before, I thought I’d touch on it briefly. A while ago VSCO released an updated version of their Film series of Lightroom Presets to support the Fuji X-Pro 2 and XT-2. I finally got around to trying it out, and I’m liking the results.
With most cameras that are released these days having video, it may seem like a pointless exercise to point out the benefits of having the feature. However, if you read the comments on reviews of new cameras (and you probably shouldn’t for your own mental health) there’s always someone who complains about the video functions, saying that they are a photographer and “real photographers” don’t care about video. Even if you don’t like shooting video, I think that there are times when it’s a real benefit to have video in your camera, and the other day I came across a perfect example.
I recently posted a piece about shooting some photos using the in-camera Acros mode on the X-Pro 2. While I posted Jpegs straight from the camera in that post, I’ve also been working on matching the effect in Raw. This might sound like a straight forward process. You just set the colour profile, right? Well, after experimenting for a bit, there seems to be more to it than that.
I've been suffering from something akin to writers block when it comes to photography lately. A lot of things are getting to me and frustrating me creatively. While Autumn had been my favourite time of the year for photography for many years, a few weeks ago it was the anniversary of my mother’s passing away, and that has changed my feelings about the season. Autumn is now a reminder of that sad time, rather than the celebration of colour that I used to see. I'm sure with time this will pass, but this year was difficult. On top of that, the weather has been dark and cold, so that hasn't exactly helped things. I wanted to try and channel some of these feelings and reflect the mood of both the environment and myself, and so I headed out the other day to try something a little different.
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.
I have just updated my Fuji X-Trans Lightroom guide with some significant changes. I’m calling it “version 1.5” and it contains some updated information, including some notes on processing 24mp X-Trans files, such as those from the X-Pro 2. I also tried to incorporate as much of the feedback and questions that I’ve received since the initial release. I also used the opportunity of releasing an updated edition to make some other changes and include some additional detail. If you had previously purchased this guide, the updated version is available for free to download from your account
I was walking through a local park here in Dublin the other day, and I loved how the low Autumn sun was creating these lovely patterns of Dappled light on the ground. In the shadows of the trees there were patches of sunshine that danced as the breeze blew the leaves. It was quite beautiful and relaxing, and as I had my trusty X-Pro 2 with me I decided that I would shoot some video as well as stills.
I’ve been very busy working on an update for my Lightroom X-Trans processing guide. I had hoped to have it out a while ago, but it ended up taking longer than anticipated. The revised version of my guide, features updates to cover some changes that I’ve noticed in the approach that I take for the newer 24mp X-Trans cameras such as the X-Pro 2 and the X-T2. I’ve also added a few new sections, and made it longer
I’ve always been quite fond of textures and patterns. I find that, even in the seemingly harsh and cold medium of concrete and glass there can be beauty. I spent a few hours the other day in one of the newest parts of Dublin City, where there are lots of modern buildings as well as ongoing construction, and the light was just right to really emphasis the aesthetics of these elements.
As regular readers will undoubtedly know, I’m somewhat preoccupied (some would say obsessed) with various RAW converters and the differences between them, especially when it comes to Fuji x-Trans support. I’ve found that because of the uniqueness of Fuji’s X-Trans sensor, the results you can get from processing RAW files in different raw converters can vary significantly. I reported last week that Apple has (finally) added X-Pro 2 support to Photos and other software that uses Apple’s system wide Raw engine. I only briefly looked at it then, but in this post I want to examine it in more detail.
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.
I conducted a fun and somewhat interesting experiment the other day I went out shooting with my X-Pro 2. Instead of the usual Fuji glass, I instead used a 50 year old vintage soviet era lens. The lens is the FED Industar 50mm f/2.8 from my old FED 2 camera. The lens gave some interesting results, and it was quite a bit of fun to shoot with.
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.
I've said this many times on this blog, but Autumn is my absolute favourite time of the year. I love the golden leaves on the trees and the Autumn light. While the season is only beginning here in Ireland, already the trees are starting to turn. The once dense green foliage has started to thin out and the canopy of leaves has gone from a deep lush green, to a speckled patchwork of green and gold.
