"See" Trials - The Fujifilm X-E1 Outdoors

Photo #1

Pancake Breakfast: I decided to shoot this Journal assignment with my 2 Fujifilm X-cameras: My X-100s for those situations where I might need to supplement the ambient lighting with a flash, and my X-E1 with a 12 mm 2.8 and 35 1.4 lens. I figured that the fixed lens X-100s with its 35mm equivalent lens would be the happy medium lens, allowing me to go wide or slightly longer when the appropriate lens was fitted to the X-E1 body. I also brought a dedicated Fuji EF-42 in case I needed the assistance of a flash with dedicated TTL capabilities. The kit, incidentally, weighed a fraction of my digital single lens reflex (DSLR) kit. Photo #1 is the shot I submitted.

Unlike my earlier posts, this is not a Fuji love-fest. When photographing plants and other inanimate objects in my office, it was easy to be mesmerized by the sharpness of the lenses and the surprisingly rapid focus acquisition. My field experience would prove otherwise. 

Photo #2

The first thing I noticed was the difficulty of making exposure adjustments. While the ability to see both the shutter speed and aperture setting when viewing the camera from above, it wasn't as convenient (for me, at least) as viewing the control panel located atop most DSLR cameras. Pressing the clearly marked ISO or the White Balance buttons on the body would display the current settings in the control panel. Checking these settings in an X-camera requires you to look for the shutter and aperture settings in two different locations, and then switch to the viewfinder/LCD display to access menus to change the ISO and white balance. After years of working with digital Nikon bodies, this difference was more than a little inconvenient. Granted, there are programmable keys on the X bodies, but one would need to remember what these programmed functions were, something I haven’t really considered until now. But when used under even lighting conditions (open shade in the case of Photo #2), the X-E1 proved to be an excellent camera. This shot, made with the 35mm 1.4 shot wide open, is just about perfect.

Flash! Fuji's EF-42 Flash is definitely not up to the X camera’s professional potential. First off, this dedicated flash was extremely difficult to adjust on the fly. 

• The flash has only two adjustment buttons: one to select the mode, and one to make the adjustments. 
• The adjustments are changed in an “around the world” mode: You can go from full power to half power, but returning to full power requires a trip through quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second power before you can get back on top. 
• Plus and minus flash Exposure Compensation, along with zoom (beam spread) adjustments must be done by navigating to a specific menu dedicated to each adjustment. 
• Exposure Compensation for the flash was only +/- 1.5 stops in 1/2 stop increments, compared to Nikon's +/- 3 stops in 1/3 stop increments. This is too narrow a range to be of much use beyond the liberal requirements of a "party flash", and can make it difficult to fill shadows at short shooting distances. 
• When the flash is mounted in the hot shoe, you can no longer see the shutter speed dial.

Photo #3

The X-E1's Flash Synchronization: The X body itself has limits. The maximum flash synchronization speed of 1/180th of a second translates into relatively small apertures when shooting in daylight. To get this shot (Photo #3), I switched to my X100s set to 1/400 of a second, 5.6, ISO 200, and the flash set to manual, full power. You can see the flash improves the detail in the shadow side of the children's faces , even at a distance of over 20 feet. The image was cropped severely.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/m3.htm

It Loves Me, It Loves Me Not: If Love and Hate can exist together in photography, I found it with the Fuji X-E1 and the X100s. After some thought, I concluded that the very things that made them such a retro "hit" are what made them difficult to work with. In the film based Leica, the shutter speed dial was located near the mechanism that governed the shutter. In other words, it had to be placed where it was placed. In this top view of the venerable Leica M3 (left, above), you can see that the shutter speed dial is placed on the top plate, next to the accessory shoe and in line with the shutter mechanism deep inside the body.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x-e1.htm

This photo of the Fuji X-E1 body (right) clearly shows the similarity of control placement. Aside from the electrical contacts located in the hot shoe and the obvious digital references (ON/OFF, Fn, Auto settings), you probably couldn't tell this was a digital body. These two images are not to scale, and there really is more room on the Leica than there is on the Fuji. Incidentally, Ken Rockwell, a popular photo blogger, provides the beginning photographer with mountains of practical information.Check out is web site: http://www.kenrockwell.com.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d300/

When "fly by wire" digital cameras were designed, the locations of the controls could be anywhere a small control module could be placed. The designers started with a traditional camera body forms and infused those digital controls in locations dictated by convenience, not by mechanics. In this photo of a Nikon D300 (left), you can see that the controls and the display are clustered together for convenient access by the user's thumb and forefinger. The LCD Control Panel displays nearly all of the information a photographer could possibly need to see, and it's all in one place.

The Nugget: After some thought, I felt I could summarize the Fuji X-camera experience by saying this:  

• You set the exposure on an X-camera; you control it on a DSLR.

• X-cameras are marginally more responsive when it comes to handling (weight, eye placement), while DSLRs are more responsive when it comes adjustments. 

I would concede that if I were working in a small indoor room and needed to be as inconspicuous as possible, I would definitely choose an X-camera because of its nearly silent operation and my ability to "chimp" an image without taking it from my eye. If weight were also an issue, the X-cameras would be a better choice. But when it comes to outdoor shots where longer distances and fast action are expected, the DSLR would win on all counts. And if I needed flash to supplement a wide variety of lighting situations, the Fuji X-100 with its sync-at-all-speeds leaf shutter might save the day, if I could get by with a 35mm equivalent lens.

http://life.time.com

I won't be "retiring" my newly acquired X-cameras any time soon. I can be as much of a sentimentalist as the next photographer, and the nearly silent operation of the X-cameras gives the digital shooter  a chance to re-visit the fundamental operational differences between the Nikon F and the Leica M3 cameras. In fact, many photographers carried two Leica M3s equipped with wide angle lenses and two Nikon Fs with telephotos, each camera body playing the advantages of the lenses attached to them. At the right is Larry Burrows, (1926-1971), a Life magazine photographer shown preparing his cameras for what would become "One Ride With Yankee Papa 13", an essay published in Life Magazine on April 16, 1965. He typically carried two Leicas in the front, with two Nikons hanging from his shoulders. I know there were few (if any)  zoom lenses available to the working photojournalist during Burrows' time, so multiple cameras were necessary to avoid changing lenses in the field.

Both the Leica M3 and the Nikon F had their adherents when Kodak was king, and with the introduction of the Fuji X-cameras we have a way to experience two different approaches to photography in a digital venue. Obviously Burrows knew the circumstances when one camera platform would be superior to the other, and in his choice of both rangefinders and SLRs, appears to have been well prepared for whatever came his way.

"See" Trials - The Fujifilm X-E1 Indoors

When I started writing this post, I wasn't wild about the original color JPEGs. But when the same images had their "color removed", they took on a totally different, more comfortable feel. I suspect they reminded me of my early available light images, taken with my father's Mamayaflex, loaded with Kodak Tri-X film, and developed and printed at my home darkroom. And while I'll be the first to decry the rather poor quality of these quick monochrome renderings, the simple black and white conversion made them easier (for me, at least) to view without detracting from the original intent of this posting.

I am beginning to draw my own conclusions about when to use the Fuji cameras (X-E1 and X100s) and when to use my more conventional SLR cameras. I admire the work of photographers like Zack Arias, one of several high profile advocates of the mirrorless technology.  I see the spirit of the "street photographer" in his work, resulting in feeling of a voyeur without any hint of prurience. Photos from a trip to Havana, Cuba in this blog entry captured some very intimate slices of life. Not sensual, but he captures images of things that might normally escape our gaze, or that we secretly want to stare at, but feel we shouldn't.

Unobtrusive: These photos were taken during a letter writing campaign here at the Adult School. I was able to move easily about the room carrying only the X-E1 and its 18-55mm f/2.8-4 kit lens. Aperture wide open and set to its shortest focal length, the lens isn't particularly fast, becoming less so when zoomed to its longest focal length of 50mm. It doesn't have the delineated plane of focus provided by my heavier, but faster, DSLR zooms. But the camera's hushed click was easy for these students to ignore, and it became easy to do followup shots without the distracting "clack" of my mirrored cameras.

Diminutive: The small size of the cameras makes them far less intimidating, a fact that has been proven over and over again in a variety of venues. Its size and feel reminded me of my Olympus 35SP, my first, and last, "daily carry" camera I ever owned. Even my recently purchased 12mm Zeiss Touit lens with its 67mm filters seems so much smaller than my SLR lenses. Mounted on the undersized XE1 body, the combination is almost laughable.

Precision: I consider this both a plus and a minus. To the debit, the small size puts the external buttons uncomfortably close to one another, and I found myself inadvertently changing settings from time to time. To the credit side, make a single photograph became an act of critical focus, literally. While the external adjustments for aperture setting and exposure time were clearly visible from above one had to check them frequently to make sure that no settings had gone awry, which they sometimes did. I was annoyed by the lack of markings on the kit zoom. You really couldn't tell if you had changed your aperture setting unless you checked in the view finder. I suspect I could learn to check my settings on the LCD display before bringing the camera to my eye, but when using a camera that took such pride in its retro layout, it seems awkward, and illogical. I do understand that a properly marked aperture ring would be problematic, since the current offering of zoom lenses have variable maximum aperture settings (remember the F 2.8-4 spec on the kit lens?). This shortcoming does not apply to the prime (non-zoom) lenses.

Focusing: I found this to be a little annoying. First off, under some conditions, the electronic viewfinder was not as responsive as a mirrored reflex camera. Certainly the efficiency has increased dramatically since the days of the Sony R1, but isn't up to the level of a current DSLR. And while the general layout of the viewfinder was logical for a former rangefinder shooting like myself, the focusing sensor, located where the split-image ranger finder used to be, didn't seem to adapt to the focus/re-compose sequence I've become accustomed to. And while its location can be moved, you must take the camera from your eye because there isn't enough space between the back of the camera and your cheek to "feel" the adjustments. Perhaps it's the barely perceptible blurring that inevitably occurs when the camera is repositioned during the final phase of composition, but there's definitely something bothersome about the view. 

This shouldn't be confused with sensitivity, however. I've gotten sharply focused images in situations where the low level of existing light would have given most SLR conniptions. The Fuji could lock focus on the proverbial "black cat in a coal bin", but it took a while to do it.

For right now, the Fuji seems to be at its best when shooting available light indoors. If the "stealthy photographer" approach is required, the nearly silent, mirrorless wonders will certainly fill the bill. But be prepared to shoot slowly and with great deliberation.