The X100 Cameras Go Out For The Day...

And the evening, too. Not everything happens in a studio, so you have to go out to where they store the landscapes. You might be able to make convincing copies on a tabletop or in Photoshop, but if you use the original scenes it is a lot cheaper and quicker.

Jandakot, again, and boiling hot. It can't be too much fun to do circuits and bumps in the heat and I daresay there is quite a lot of turbulence coming up off the tarmac. Nevertheless, I balanced one X 100 in one hand and one X100F in the other and tried to track the same planes in the same phase of takeoff.

The settings are as before - ProNeg Hi for the X100F and Provia for the X100. See the difference that it makes with the grass colour? As before the X100F is on Large/Fine JPEG and the X 100 is running RAW.

The picture sizes are adjusted in the final result to show the resolution. The tail registration numbers on the aircraft prove that the X100F JPEG is better than the X100 RAW...but by just a little bit.

Note as well in the uncropped versions that the vignetting the X100 is prone to is easily seen against the mid-blue sky. Not there in the X100F file. As an effect in portraiture or reportage - very helpful. In landscapes, not so much.

Later in the day the good old South Perth foreshore at dusk delivered the goods. It also delivered the ants - watch yourselves when you set up for landscape shots - some of the landscape regards you as food.

The fact that the X100F could be run at much higher ISO before electronic noise crept in - a function of the newer processor in the camera - meant that the motion of the water was easier to stop. In the case of these shots I relented and shifted both cameras to Velvia and both AE systems to Average.

I reviewed the images and found a number of them unusable:

a. The panorama pictures that you can do at 120º or 180º looked fine on the back of the LCD but as they were taken at a slow shutter speed and too high a rotation rate, there was a lot of motion blur. The cure would have been to set the shutter speed to 1/60 to 1/180 of a second and raise the ISO accordingly.

b. Some of the still shots had a surprising amount of blur. This is my fault for trusting a lightweight tripod and no cable release - even the pressure of me jabbing down on the camera was enough to displace it slightly. The studio Gitzo Studex 5 on a concrete floor is one thing - a spindly tripod on grass is another. Lesson learned for next time.

 

Note the thunderhead seen earlier in the day down the length of our street. I took it as much to test the dynamic range of the camera, as to admire the beauty of nature. The lightning show was great at South Perth as well, though no-one did as well with the lightning pictures as our friend Duncan Dodd. He may have arranged for the thunderstorm just to get some good pictures down at Rockingham.

One Owner - Never Raced Or Rolled ...

I wouldn't be selling it except I'm going overseas...

Well, before you rush me with offers I have to confess that this pristine Rolls Royce does not belong to me. It is in the possession of a chap named Bill. He let me photograph it at Cannington but made me promise not to touch the paintwork in case I left any fingerprints on it.

I can respect that, as I have seen some terrible things done to vintage cars in Melbourne when the Australia Day crowds start fingering the Fords and smearing the Simcas. I would not have the nerve to exhibit a veteran or vintage car in the RACV show in the park because I have seen how invasive the spectators can be.

Well, back to my car shoot for Bill. I scoped out the car the day before the shoot and took some preliminary shots in monochrome - just the on-camera flash tube that pops up over the lens on the Fujifilm X-T10. I selected the 27mm F:2.8 lens as the most convenient one for this sort of work - I am going to look at the new 23mm f:2 WR when it arrives.

Good shots. Good record shots, but somewhat flat - even for monochrome. So on the shoot day I opted for the Fujifilm EF-42 lens with the new Mag Mode mushroom dome diffuser in front of it. The real secret of getting modelling, light and shadow, was the use of a TTL cord from camera to flash.

I was able to see the car in the tilting LCD screen at a convenient angle, and then use the flash in the other hand to rise up above the scene  and let light fall naturally. The roof of the building housing the car was a long way up and would not have been a good bounce reflector so I opted for the hand-held light.

A two handed shoot is not much fun if you have a long lens on the camera - the moment of force generated by the 18-135mm f:3.5-5.6 WR is such that you can hardly hold the camera body steady as you work. But anything that is physically smaller, from the 60mm macro on downward to the 27mm is a breeze. You can also make use of the camera strap braced agains the back of your neck for even more steadiness.

I would also particularly recommend that users of the Fujifilm X system look into the film simulation settings in the menu and seek out the PRO Neg Hi setting, if you have it. I can get it on three of my cameras and I must say it looks as though it is finally the way that I see colour. I still like Classic Chrome for the retro look, but PRO Neg Hi cuts it for nearly everything else.