Well I spent my money and I took my chance –and it looks as though the bet paid off.
Last week I bought a new Fuji X 10 – the little brother to the X 100 and the new XPro-1. It’s the one with the 28-105 zoom lens and the optical finder up on the northwest corner. I bought it as a tourist camera for an upcoming holiday.
After an evening mastering the functions – code for reading the book and pushing the menu button – I tried it on indoor portraits – the fill flash coped with a self portrait against an overhead light, and it coped very well. It is as good a use of this lighting pattern as I could have achieved with my larger cameras and flashes, and it was a no-skill shot. Win.
The next test was outside under shade – the car in the carport. Here the EXR mode that deals with an extended dynamic range did show a noticeable improvement over straight shooting, but I still found that the little fill flash was a good idea – the car has metallic paint. The 28mm equivalent focal length is just right for a close car shot.
Sunday I took the Fuji into the studio as it has a standard hot shoe on top and you can order it to fire independently – and connected it to the studio strobes. The Fuji has a lens barrel that is smallish in diameter but extends out away from the camera body – I wanted to see if it would do the tabletop setups. Frequently my larger lenses restrict the point of view in these shots and it would be an advantage to be able to fit into model scenery.
Result? Brilliant. Does just what I wanted to do and produces a jpeg file that is perfect for backdrop work. Oddly enough there is no preset for “flash” in the menu but there is a custom Kelvin setting and 5600K is perfect for my Elinchroms. The camera has a conventional mechanical connection for the cable release – and at one stage of the afternoon I laughed at myself for using a release that was bigger than the camera.
Don’t ask me about RAW images yet – my old Adobe program needs an update to cope with the Fuji RAW. But it is coming so when I get the chance I’ll fix it. In the meantime I think this the travel camera for me for a long time to come – more reports from Melbourne in a month.
