Fuji Hello

decades

New Member
Hey everyone. Quite new to Fuji and this forum, so I wanted to introduce myself.

I first developed my love for photography when I was about 17 years old. I took a course in school to a fill an art credit (thank you, suburban NY upbringing).

I used my dad's old Pentax and learned to develop my own black and white prints in the school's dark room. We learned to beg extra rolls off the teacher for the weekends, and me and my friends would shoot, shoot, shoot each other doing all the stupid shit 17 year olds do.

I killed that camera. And dad's other one (sorry, dad). Then I went to university, and got to work. I stopped shooting, and focused on my work, internship, job, cross country move, more jobs, an international move. Before I know it, I'm a lot older and living in London feeling this profound itch to start shoot again.

Between 18 and now, I have only shot with some hideous giant Canon thing I bought second hand and various iPhones. My wife encourages my desire to buy a new kit, and we spend what feels like endless hours trawling through London camera shops (and I put in even more work researching online).

I end up back at the start, Jessops, Oxford Street. I have fallen for the look and manual controls of a Fuji xt10, but the thing is stupid slow and can't focus on anything, even in bright shop light. To my newcomer eye, it also feels too expensive for what it is. This is immediate to me, even with my limited camera exposure in the last 13 or so years.

The shop assistant is trying to push a Sony a6something on me, showing me how it does this and that and maybe even takes a decent picture. But the camera feels cheap in my hand, the menus are draining. Basically, it feels more like a VCR than the cutting edge image making tool the sales guy is hyping it up to be. It's horrible and I leave in a huff.

This was meant to be my day where I finally get to take something home, and I felt stuck between choosing something sexy, stupid and slow, and soulless black box stamped with SONY on the front.

I start the research over again the minute I get home and discover a new brand that (somehow) I've not come across before – Olympus. I instantly fall in love with the em10 I'm reading about, and manage to find a shop that seems to have one in stock. The very next day I get up and out and rush to Tottenham Court Road and, yes, the Curry's does have one in stock.

I'm playing with the display model for about 5 minutes before I know this is the camera for me. It's bloody fast. It focuses correctly, every single test shot. It's tiny. And it's very, very affordable. I buy it, the kit lens, and some memory cards, run to the nearest coffee shop. I've got an entry level M43 camera, but my hands shake as I take it out the box. I am so happy in this moment.

From here, I pretty much take the little guy everywhere I go. It goes in my bag, and I go out the door.

Soon I add the 17mm f1.8 to the body, never touching the kit lens again. We travel more, around the UK, to Greece, to Japan. The size, the flip screen, the speed – everything adds up to a camera that just works the way I want cameras to work. I take a lot of shit pictures, and some OK ones as well.

Nine months later I buy a Pen-F, and re-home the EM-10 with my brother on a visit back to the States, and it begins again.

I kept that Pen-F for about 14 months, and that guy compelled me to shoot every single day. And that's no joke – even if it's just the sun coming up while I'm making my morning coffee, I shoot something almost every single day.

So, thanks Olympus. Thanks for getting me back into photography.

But Olympus and I had to part ways.

While I loved shooting the Pen-F, I found it often had too many options.

I've always been a JPEG shooter, but even still the creative dial was an unexpected delight to me. Colour mode 2 and Mono mode 2 have real soul to the way the render.

But I was hugely drawn to Fuji's cameras for their colour rendering and film simulations, and their simplified physical controls.

Between my initial adoption of Olympus and M43, Fuji moved things on considerably and released the x100f.

Once I tried an x100f, it was all over in short order. I sold my Olympus kit, bought an x100f, and have been delighted ever since.

It's not all perfect. Compared to Olympus, Fuji autofocus is terrible. Olympus can get 5-stop IBIS into cheap bodies, and Fuji seems to not even consider it. But the frames that come out of the x100f are absolutely gorgeous, and I love having that thing in my hands.

My two weeks with the x100f have been something of a re-education. Learning to slow down (because the AF is shit). Learning to take more time composing (because the VF is so much bigger than shit VF on the Pen-F).
 
First, welcome. Your path to this point is somewhat common around here, I think. I shot film in highschool too (90-94), loved the dark room, rolled my own TMax for the weekends, and shot all my friends doing dumb shit. I still have most of those shots, even some of my own prints made at oddball sizes.

Second, I'm curious what lens was on the X-T10 you found so horribly slow to focus. Assume it was the 18-55, which ... usually doesn't disappoint anyone but $5,000 Canon 5D owners. But then Olympus's M4/3 stuff is supposed to be about as good as AF gets, bar none, so maybe you've got nowhere to go but down. I ask because some lenses do WAY worse than others.
 
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