X-T1 at 1200 Frames

 
X-T1, XC 16-50 OIS II

So I'm at 6 weeks and 1200 frames with the X-T1. Yes, shooting has taken a nosedive over the last two weeks, largely because the weather was cold and I've been sick. Now we're heading into the March blah's, where the city is grey and bland and uninteresting until the new growth arrives. For this year, I'm going to try and get some street shooting in to carry me over as normally this is a real dead zone for my shooting (as is the late fall/early winter blahs between the leaves coming down and the snow arriving).

I've now shot 50% more work with the X-T1 than with my previous Fuji's. I expect that by mid-April I will be up to the point that the work with the X-T1 exceeds all previous Fuji work.


I  traded a lens and an old Nikon body for another X-E1, which is mostly for backup to the X-T1, but may become a bag camera with one of the neat little cheapo Chinese primes that are available now, I'm thinking the 7artisans 25/1.7 might be neat, and it's all of $80 new. I don't expect to shoot much with the X-E1, it's really just a spare. It did remind me just what a big jump there was in responsiveness between the 1st gen X bodies (X-Pro1, X-E1) and the 2nd gen ones (X-T1, X-T10, X-E2)

I continue to really enjoy shooting with the X-T1. At this point I'm a few weeks away from exceeding how much I shot with the A7II last year. As long as the X-T1 keeps making me want to get out and shoot it will be staying in the bag. Fundamentally I'm just really happy with it.

Also as a result of this I've been doing more street shooting, most of which has been headed to Instagram. My Instagram is now dedicated to shooting & posting on the fly, nothing new gets posted after coming home and being culled (that goes to Flickr).

Looking Back - The NEX-7

 
NEX-7, Micro-Nikkor 85/3.5 VR G DX

The NEX-7 is one of the three mirrorless bodies that I shot a truly significant amount of work with, the other two being the Panasonic G1 and the original Olympus OM-D E-M5.

I found the NEX-7 to be an outstanding street & walkabout camera, but despite its then class-leading resolution, it was a truly poor landscape camera due to the utterly terrible tripod mount and complete lack of any remote release option. It simply wasn't possible to sturdily mount the NEX-7 to a tripod, you had to use a tripod foot on an adapter and/or lens for a solid mount. Ironically that made the NEX-7 the best landscape shooting option for APS-C A mount shooters as it had the best low-ISO IQ of all the APS-C Sony bodies since it did not give up noise/IQ performance for a light-stealing pellical mirror unlike its sibling the A77.

For street shooting the combination of small size, good overall handling and a high quality EVF made it work quite well for street shooting. The only real downside was the relatively large size of the E ZA 24/1.8, which was the go-to street lens for this camera. One overall challenge with E mount was the general lack of mid-speed/mid-size lenses. There eventually was a nice selection of smallish f2.8 lenses from Sony (16/2.8, 20/2.8 pancakes) and Sigma (the 19, 30 and 60 f2.8 trio) but aside from the 35/1.8 OSS, there aren't any really compact APS-C options. That's a significant contrast to m43 and Fuji X mounts, both of which are well supplied with compact f1.7-2 lenses in the mild wide to mild tele range.

As I was an early adopter (I had one of the very first NEX-7's to hit Canada, some 6 months after it was announced) this was even worse, as the earlier NEX bodies hadn't really driven development of lenses. Even with Sony's general ignoring of the APS-C side of things there is a really solid selection of lenses for APS-C E mount users, especially if you are willing to manual focus.

I also briefly picked up a NEX-7 last May, which I returned fairly quickly. While the handling remained good, what was class-leading AF in early 2012 was noticeably slow in 2018, and of course I made the decision to replace the NEX-7 and D800 with a single A7II. That mostly worked, and probably would have worked better if I'd had a single AF lens for the system.

The NEX-7 did have some distinct issues that Sony could have resolved. The biggest was the lack of configurability of the Manual Focus assist. This was an ongoing issue for me, as you could not set the zoom function to button only, it was either button with manual lenses and auto with AF lenses, or off.

Overall, I produced excellent work with this system, but can't really see myself looking at APS-C E mount unless Sony actually puts some effort into it and introduces an SLR-style body and a selection of APS-C oriented primes. Oh, and I'd have to want to give up the X-T1, which seems unlikely right now.

X-T1 at 900

X-A1, XF 18/2 R


I'm now up to 950 or so shots on the X-T1 after two and a half weeks of ownership. That's more than I shot with any of my previous X bodies (the X-E1 or either X-A1).

I'm still really enjoying shooting it. It's not perfect my any means, I really understand the complaints about button size, especially when wearing gloves. The drive, metering and exposure comp are a touch prone to getting knocked out of their settings, but that's very livable, especially since the settings are so readily visible (both on the camera and in the viewfinder.

I've taken to mostly shooting in the EVF+Eye Sensor mode, which turns on the EVF when the camera is at my face and leaves it off otherwise. That helps with battery life. Since the EVF/LCD mode is controlled by a button on the EVF hump, it's easy to cycle through all 4 modes (Eye Sensor switching, EVF Only, LCD only and EVF+Eye Sensor). This is true even with gloves due to the location of the button.

The big thing though is the camera just gets out of my way. It's rare that I even have to think about something with it. What's odd about that is that I've had the camera for less than 3 weeks, and it's in a system I haven't shot with in years, and with a different UI than either of the previous bodies I've owned (the X-A1 has a pretty typical single-dial interface and the X-E1 has a shutter speed dial, but otherwise fairly modern UI). The only time I have to really think about things is with the focus magnification. I think I need to find a little stick-on dot to make that button more noticeable, but it should largely go away once we get out of glove weather.

A Few Thoughts On What's Worked Best For Me

 
E-M5, Sigma 19/2.8 DN


Looking back through my Flickr stream has shown me some interesting things. Back in 2017 I noted that I'd actually had more posted work from my Minolta bodies than the Nikon's that have been the most common film camera in my bag for the last 18 years. The quality of work posted is in a lot of ways the final arbiter of how well a camera has worked for me.

Looking back at my Digital archives, it's clear that my period with the E-M5 was the most productive period on digital I posted 234 images on my Flickr stream from it, around 10% of my total work on the stream, and those have survived 2 culls (one prior to posting, then the periodic culls that I do of my stream to remove the weaker work from it). After that the NEX-7 and D300 have produced the most lasting work (151 and 143 items respectively). The D800, D200 and A33 come next, (84, 74 and 72 items respectively). That's unsurprising, I shot a LOT with the A33, but the majority was event & bar work which never hit my Flickr, while the D800 and D200 didn't last long, but coincided with major jumps in my shooting activity. The D800 number will grow as there's 23 more shots in the backlog that haven't been posted. Honestly, if I was looking for a tripod body to complement the Fuji system for high-resolution work, I could do a lot worse than another D800.

It's when I get down to the everything else that things get interesting. The D7100 in particular resulted in a shockingly high amount of good work, with 31 items posted from less than a month of ownership across 2 bodies. That really does speak to how poor a decision to trade it in for the D600 was (the D600 only produced 23 posts from its 2-ish months of ownership). There's really very little Pentax work, but the m43 stuff and Nikon stuff dominates overall.

Oh, and the Fuji stuff previously is pretty much middle of the pack, slightly surprising given my memories of the X-E1. The X-T1 is obviously low (7 items posted), but will climb quickly, especially given I'm almost at 900 shots after two weeks of ownership and already have 1 Explore from that work.

Thoughts From the Past - Photography as Therapy

 
*istD, Tamron SP 28-7/2.8 XR Di


This is a repost from Sept 2007

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance today at lunch (one of the myriad of photogs I run into at the local camera stores, I work around the corner from two of the main camera stores in Toronto, so I'm in there alot) and the conversation moved to how I justify the money I spend on photography (both on kit and on expendables like film, ink, paper and chemicals).

The answer? It's still cheaper than a good shrink. And it's true. My job is relatively high-stress, I'm on-call 24x7 for the most part. I'd have burnt out long ago if I didn't have some good stress relief that didn't cause cancer or liver disease. And photography helps me stay sane. It does so in a number of ways:

1. Retail Therapy. Buying stuff is fun. Buying stuff for yourself can help cheer you up and take your mind off of stress. Yes, this works. If in doubt, ask your girlfriend's purse collection ;-)

2. Meditation. For me, the mindless rhythm of developing is good meditation. It's one of the reasons why developing doesn't annoy me or seem like a waste of time (unlike doing RAW conversions). And the slow pace of working with a MF camera on a tripod is also meditation (I suspect LF is the photographic equivalent of Yoga, gotta get into LF one of these days).

3. Escape. Photography is a great escape from the pressures of life. I don't have time to think about work when I'm out shooting. I can only think about the shooting itself.

It's interesting that 12 years later, this really still applies, although it's become less effective for me. I think that's because I've not done as much of #2 and #3 since I went back to school in late 2008.

Looking Back on 10 Years of Mirrorless

 
X-T1, XC 16-50 OIS II

I bought my first mirrorless camera in January of 2009, a Panasonic G1. Since that time I've also owned Fujifilm, Olympus and Sony mirrorless bodies, one Sony SLT and a number of Nikon, Pentax, Sony and Olympus DSLR's. I'm a constant horse-trader, so these have mostly been purchased used with the proceeds of a previous sale.

Mirrorless is ideal for the way I work. The small sized bodies are around the same size & weight of the classic manual focus SLR's I prefer for film work, as are the lenses. The focusing experience is much better than AF DSLR's for manual work and I generally don't care about Continuous AF performance, which has always been the weak point for mirrorless. They're also small and unobtrusive, always a bonus for street & cityscape work.

As to the cameras:

The G1 worked very well for me initially, but I always had some challenges with its weakpoints, really with low light shooting which is what I was mostly doing in 2009 and 2010 when I owned it (it's still in the family, but the replacements have moved on).

The Panasonics have mostly worked pretty well for me. I've also had the G3 and GX7 and I purely loved the GX7, however it was the nadir of my shooting and I sold it off because I just wasn't really using anything at all. Frankly, if I'd kept the GX7 I might still be shooting it today, it really was a pretty good fit.

Olympus has always looked good on the initial experience, but come up short over time. With the E-M5 and E-M1 it was a combination of fiddly buttons and the camera getting in my way, I really liked the results and as long as the camera came out of the bag in the mode I expected it to be in. That said, IMHO the best work I've shot in the last 10 years on digital was with the E-M5. The E-PM1 was a nice bag camera and while it was useless in low light, I did like it in better light, especially when paired with the PL 25/1.4.

Sony was a mixed bag for me. The NEX-5's produced great images, but have terrible handling and all the limitations of a viewfinderless camera. I mostly loved the NEX-7's for street/walkabout photography, but they were useless on a tripod. The A7II went from mild like to mild dislike over time, I loved the ability to nail focus, especially with the ZF.2 85/1.4, but everything else slowly annoyed me, although never by very much. I really could have kept it if I had a reason to.

Fujifilm is interesting. I loved the X-A1's, my favourite viewfinderless camera. But it never worked as a primary for me. The X-E1 in 2014 was just not workable, the RAW conversion issues and speed were just too slow. It probably could be a successful alternative to the X-A1 as a bag camera though. Given my experience so far with the X-T1, I really wish I'd stuck with the Fuji stuff the second time around and added an X-T1 then, or even the first time and just shot JPEG until the RAW issues were solved.

The reality is looking back I never should have got out of m43 until the X-T1 showed up, and even then probably not. I would have had a much better experience if I'd just stayed the course rather than chasing the dragon. My basic m43 kit with the E-M5 covered all my real needs. Even today, I'd probably be just fine with an E-M1 or later GX series body and a handful of primes (12/2, 15/1.7, 25/1.8 or 25/1.4, 45/1.8 or 42.5/1.7, 60) And I could easily have put that kit together over the years. The same really goes for Fuji the second time through. It's clear than Sony and I don't get along.

Red Sky Over St Clair West

 
X-T1, Nikkor 200mm f4 AI


Pretty much the first actual shooting with adapted lenses I've done with the X-T1. Transferring buses at St Clair & Ossington on my way home let me see this gorgeous sky at dusk. Took a few shots with the 16-50, but I just couldn't get what I wanted. So I took a gamble by throwing on the 200/4 and it paid off in spades. Caught the red sky reflecting off the tracks and two of the new Bombardier Streetcars eastbound. I'd thought about trying the 50-135/3.5 instead, but decided on the extra reach and I'm glad I did.