Back in 2006 when I got my first digital SLR I used to take it everywhere. As time went on I accumulated more lenses, a second body and some flashes, and whenever I travelled anywhere, whether it was a weekend in Barcelona or a week hiking the Cinque Terre my big heavy kit came with me (it actually never occurred to me that lugging an extra 15kg on my back was ridiculous.)
As I got older I learned that it didn’t have to be that way. Trips were less about photos and more about just enjoying the moments and I soon progressed to taking one SLR with one 50mm prime lens. This was revolutionary and liberating, I wasn’t a slave to the photos, I wasn’t mucking around switching lenses while cool stuff was happening around me. This trip to Sydney was my first experiment in keeping it light and it was brilliant.
Soon enough even an SLR with one lens was too big. Right around this time the likes of Fuji, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony were producing great little cameras with image quality that wasn’t too far from SLR standard. In 2012 I went on my honeymoon and borrowed a Fuji X100 from James Field, a man whose generosity is matched only by his latte art and Stakhanovite ability to regularly shoot long weddings on consecutive days. I loved the camera but it had quirks, there were workarounds for most of them but but the poor focusing was a bit of a deal breaker.
Still, I loved carrying this beautiful little object around with me and even managed to reel off a couple of award winning photos that helped propel me to the title of runner up AIPP South Australian Travel Photographer of the Year for 2013.
Years passed.
My wife and I had a baby and we were heading up to Queensland for a week with a toddler, there wouldn’t be much time for photos nor space for bulky cameras. It was time to bite the bullet and purchase an X100 of my very own, except by now it was the X100s and all the quirks from the first model had been ironed out. It’s a brilliant travel camera, great for taking photos around the house and it looks cool sitting on a mantelpiece. It has a fixed focal length of 35mm (equivalent) which means there’s no zoom, if you want something to appear bigger then you have to move towards it. Not ideal for sports or wildlife but great for travel and street.
But what about weddings?
I never planned on using the X100s for weddings. I know how my Canon stuff works, I don’t have to think about changing settings – my fingers just do it on autopilot, I’m happy with the files it produces and I don’t actually mind too much that everything is big and heavy as the ergonomic benefits of a bigger body are huge when you’re talking thousands of photos on a wedding day and you need to access all your settings quickly.
I decided to pack the X100s in my bag on the first wedding I shot of the current season, mainly as a back-up, or perhaps to take a handful of shots once I knew I already had the good stuff on the Canons. I ended up taking a few shots and when I went through the files at home I was pleased with how they turned out, quality wise there was no discernable difference from my SLR.
I wasn’t totally sold but the Fuji had shown me enough to make the kit for my next wedding, and the one after that…
Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.
Soon enough the Fuji became part of the regular rotation. I trusted it with important shots I wasn’t also taking with my other gear.
To be honest it’s still pretty limited in how it can be used for weddings, because it’s reasonably wide angle it’s tricky to get candid people shots as you need to be right up in their grill and that kind of kills the fly of the wall thing. But every wedding I’m finding uses for it, it’s great for portraits where space is tight. I never would have thought I would use a 35mm lens for portraits but here we are…
It’s also great for detail shots which I wasn’t expecting either.
And then there’s the type of stuff I expected this camera to shine at, and it does.
So overall I’d say the Fuji wedding experiment has been a successful one. It’s frustrating at times because I can’t work operate it as effortlessly nor focus as quickly and easily as I’m used to, but I don’t use it for time critical moments, where a half second delay results in a missed shot so it’s not a huge problem. It’s certainly a good conversation starter, and it’s brings me a bit of street cred as most people think I’m shooting film (I’ll leave that up to Bentinmarcs thank you very much). I’m not rushing out to sell my Canon gear any time soon but in terms of disrupting my usual workflow and thinking patterns it’s been a really useful tool, it’s forced me to slow down and re-evaluate how I work which is never a bad thing. I’ve briefly toyed with the idea of a full switch to Fuji (they have a small body interchangeable lens system that is apparently very good) but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
In the meantime I look forward to experimenting with what this camera can do on a wedding day (in a responsible way to any brides reading this!) and I’ll no doubt be posting a bunch more photos from this camera on my Facebook page where I post something new pretty much every day.
(If you’ve got any questions or comments about this blog hit me up at my Facebook page, I’ve disabled comments here because it was way too spammy.)
