Checking out the New Camera

Now that we are in one location for a while, I've been doing some photography housekeeping and getting things in order for our next round of travels. Part of this has been to put the Nikon 1 V3 and the Fujifilm x100s on eBay to sell. Now that this has happened, I have purchased the replacement: the Fujifilm X-H1. It arrived yesterday and today I took it downtown for a stroll about to try it out.



As you can see the colors are very nice. I bought the 35 mm f2 lens and it focuses very fast and in the dim light of a cloudy Snohomish, accurately.

Yesterday afternoon I had to spend some time developing a workaround with the processing software, Capture One Pro, that I use. The problem is that C1 does not yet support this camera so I cannot simply read in the image files and process them.

The workaround relies on the fact that the sensor is the same as the Fuji X-T2 which the software does support. So I found a program on the web called "exiftool" that allows me to edit the exif information in the image file. This is a command line program that runs from Terminal. I created a folder into which I copy the image from the memory card. With a script file I run exiftool on all the images in the folder and change the name of the camera to X-T2 and then I can import the files and edit them. Slick, eh?

Clearly, this camera is a huge step up from the Fuji x100s I sold and very different from the Nikon D800E that I still use. It's going to take some getting used to. That process is what this short excursion is about...learning to use the camera.

One of the things this camera does differently than the D800E is the way it handles bracketing exposures for an HDR image. The maximum step between images on the Nikon is 1 stop. Here, it is adjustable up to 2 2/3 steps. The Nikon required you to be in a continuous shooting mode (taking pictures as long as the button is held down) to sensibly take the multiple images. The X-H1 just does it. Even if you have selected single shot per shutter press, it automatically takes all the images and is very quick about it.

This minimizes the movement of the camera between shots and makes alignment easier for the software. With the step size set to 1 2/3 stops, I took the three shot HDR shown below.

This is what spring time mostly looks like in the Pacific Northwest. It was only raining a tiny bit. The sun came in and out from behind the clouds once or twice in the morning, but this is pretty typical. Using HDR allows for a more interesting sky than the usual featureless leaden canopy over the rainy landscape.