Two months with my camera
Post last updated 28 minutes ago
It's been about two months since I got my first "real" camera, a Fujifilm XT30 III, so I thought it might be a good moment to write my impressions on it. You can click on the photos for the captions.
The first few days
As it happens when doing something for the first time, I was blasted with a ton of information, both about my camera in particular and photography in general. Aperture, focal length, proper exposure, shutter speed, film simulation, film recipes and a myriad of other terms that meant close to nothing and was hard to fit together. WHAT THE FUCK IS AN F-STOP? I would stumble between menus and settings while trying to get a shot, fucking the focus many times and getting used to the awkward feeling of carrying a camera almost every time I went outside.
It was both exciting and frustrating, but I knew I just had to push through this phase.
Overall, your average Joe photos.
Getting the hang of it
After about a week of getting used to the camera settings at least in part, I could focus more on the composition and exposure.
Around this time I also started being a bit more critical with what photos I deem worthy of posting or "keeping" for other reasons besides memories. I played around with the focal length and noticed I gravitate in the 22-28mm focal length.
GAS and experimentation
As one does after getting minimal competence doing a thing, I started asking myself if the gear isn't limiting my true ability so I got a bit of a Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Which is complete bonkers thinking, because at this point I've spent maybe a few dozen hours taking photos and I still haven't mastered my actual gear. In hindsight, it's even crazier to think that I somehow needed to upgrade my gear because at this point I started to study1 well-known photographers like Daido Moryiama or Joseph Kudelka which used far less capable gear than I had, yet managed to take one of the most memorable photos of all time.
Nonetheless, I ordered a vintage lens from eBay, a Minolta Rokkor 28mm f2.8. There are a few caveats when buying a lens for a crop sensor like my Fuji's ASP-C one and a lens with a different mount that is:
- you need an adapter, which is not very expensive but it adds to the cost.
- there is a crop factor, in my case 1.5, which means that the 28mm focal length is equivalent in FOV to a ~42mm one.
- as per the previous point, you might lose (or win, depending on what you want) some of the "character" of a vintage lens like vignetting.
The photos bellow are almost all taken with the Minolta lens (for the football ones I used the kit lens). This is also the point where I started to experiment a bit more in terms of composition, focus, exposure.
There are several more photos that I like, but some are of people that I didn't ask if they are OK to be posted in here so. After using the Minolta for about a month these are my impressions of it:
- very nice texture, it's not tack sharp, yet I enjoyed it very much.
- together with the adapter it adds quite a bit of weight compared to the kit lens.
- I realized how much I like having separate aperture and focus rings, even though the focus ring on this one felt a bit loose.
- it confirmed that for now I enjoy the ~28-35mm focal length more than the wider ones
- being a prime lens, it forced me to move and think more carefully about composition, although there were a few cases where I'd need a tad wider FOV.
- the wider max aperture came in really handy.
The last point is the most important one and why I am reluctant to retry the kit lens, but ironically, I put the kit lens back on right before doing the soccer series. Given I don't shoot that much in low light I wanted to give the kit lens another try and in some aspects (especially size) it is indeed nicer to use.
One more thing I want to mention here is that while kit lens has auto focus and it works quite fast in good lighting, the moment you get in a darker environment it will struggle both in speed and accuracy.
On post-processing
I think I mentioned it already, but I don't enjoy editing, especially the heavy editing that I see it's trending in the past (not so) few years. Too often I see photos that are saved only by some wild editing and have little or no soul.
So in this idea Fuji seems like the right price per performance option2. You can get some amazing result straight out of camera and you can just focus on composition and exposure and actually telling something as Fuji's film simulation and user made recipes provide you with a wide enough range of options regarding the style of the photo.
You can see in the photos above a wider variance of styles, taken from Fujixweekly, film.recipes, Rossandhisjpegs and Reddit. Fujixweekly is probably the most well known source, but I found his recipes to be a bit too warm (he lives in Arizona) for my taste3, so lately I moved on from his recipes. That being said, the recipes I liked the most for now are Kodachrome 64 and Pacific Blues, Leica X, Yakisugi and Vintage Color for color recipes and for B&W I oscillated a lot between Ross' OxygenMono, and Fujixweekly's Kodak Tri-X 400 and Ilford HP5 Plus 400.
Closing thoughts
I'm really happy with this camera and I'm glad I opted for it instead of the more popular X100VI, especially due to the possibility to change lenses. For the foreseeable future I'll try to decide whether I need another prime lens (I just don't vibe with zoom lenses for whatever reason) and what should that be. In an ideal world I'd probably get the XF 35mm f/2 R WR or something similar, but I don't think I'm ready to spend that much on a lens, even in used condition. I could look into another vintage lens.
I'll also try to experiment as much as I can and get a better feeling about what colors I like more. My goal would be to have about 3 presets: one for general purposes (Leica X is a strong contender), one for B&W and one with a more special look (Yakisugi or Vintage Color like).
Last but not least, a shameless plug, if you liked the photos and are curious to see more on the future, you can follow me on Instagram (I know, I know).
You can reach out by sending me an email or leave a message in my guestbook.
I used the term very loosely here.↩
Nikon and Lumix seems to have caught up the SOOC look and some say they are even more powerful than Fuji. But it comes at a much steeper cost: Just the body of the Nikon ZF is double of my whole setup and the Lumix S9 is more expensive than my camera. Of course, they have some extra features, but as a beginner I don't need them.↩
So called the piss yellow tint.↩