The days are getting colder here. I enjoy the fall very much. The better light comes earlier and I like that too. In the summer I find the clouds don’t materialize on sunny days until later in the day here. Today was filled with puffy clouds. Boats still dot the harbor but their number is slowly diminishing.
I shot these images with the wondrous Fujifilm 16mm F 1.4 lens. It can focus to an ungodly close point and for other images has very little distortion for such a wide lens. It is beautifully sharp, contrasty with great colors. I was considering abandoning the Fuji system from lack of use, but I decided to keep with it. A watershed occurred this week with Adobe’s release of a raw converter for Fuji Raw files. Prior to this, Lightroom my primary editing program (largely from lack of familiarity and being intimidated with and vexed by the complexity of Photoshop) did not render Fuji colors to my liking. Blues especially took on a greenish unnatural hue straight from the camera, requiring time consuming editing. With this change I am getting pleasant colors right out of the camera. I sold some gear and advanced to the Fuji XT3. Fuji is at the forefront in my opinion in a few ways. First, attention to its customers and products with frequent firmware updates that sometimes totally transform the camera body’s abilities. Second, with producing marvelous old school metal lenses with aperture rings, something I like. Third from the film-camera-like controls making adjustments on the fly easy. And fourth from innovation, with products sold at comparably reasonable cost.
The Fuji system is much more versatile than my Leica digital camera, a sacreligious statment to Leicaphiles. Yes, the Fuji has an endless menu system but from experience I know how to navigate it when needed. I don’t use many of the optional menu modifications. It is all about the image quality, and the Fuji system has that in spades. Renderings are different than from a Leica. This comes partly from my manner of using each camera. With the Leica I tend to be more deliberative. The Fuji gives more flexibility for color choices and for black and white options. And the Fuji is better with filters using either screw on filters or square filters since I can see the effect of the filter through the lens. The most important difference is the rendering of sharpness and contrast. Lenses for the Leica system have more subtle sharpness and trademark contrast. The Fuji lenses have more clinical sharpness, retaining great color depth and contrast. And sharpness in the Fuji is easily modified from the voluminous menu system. I am glad to have both systems and will be shooting with the Fuji in the next few weeks to bond with it again. After shooting Leica, I had “lost that lovin’ feelin”….
