I've come to a time in my life when I'm returning to old haunts, in this case photography. I was a previously a member here under another e-mail address, which is long gone, so I've registered again and will start anew.
My photographic journey started while I was in college at the University of New Orleans in the late '70's. Don't know what drew me in, but I suspect there was a photo exhibit at school that I found extremely thought provoking. B & W imagery has always had that effect on me, almost hypnotic, particularly good B & W imagery.
So the trip began with a used Minolta SRT102 with a 50mm f1.8 that I bought through the classified ad's in a local newspaper. Remember those? 😮
The Minolta whetted the appetite, but when the Olympus OM-1n's were introduced, I grabbed a new one with a 50mm f1.8 lens at Barker's, a local department store, that had an excellent camera department. The Olympus served me well for many years, into marriage and graduate school and finally parenthood.
By that stage, life had taken over and finding the time to shoot a roll or two of Tri-X, develop the film, set up the darkroom, expose prints, etc. became exceedingly difficult.
About 20 years ago, my Father-in-Law bought us a Kodak DC280 digital point and shoot. A fairly low spec camera, it was used primarily to document family events and gatherings. In the ensuing years, the DC280 was superseded by an Olympus E-10 (back to my Olympus roots) and after struggling with the capabilities of that camera for far longer than I should have, a Nikon D70 arrived on the scene.
The D70 was nirvana. The controls and menus, being relatively simplistic in those days, were easy to grasp. In the ensuing years, I became a great deal more technically proficient, dealing with Raw imagery, metadata and effective image warehousing. Many, many excellent images were captured with that camera, and it's last hurrah was documenting the devastation of my hometown, New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. The D70 went everywhere with me, grabbing images of the absolute devastation throughout the metropolitan area, including my home.
At nearly the end of our journey in reconstructing the house, Nikon introduced the D200 and 18mm-200mm zoom. I was in a local camera shop and was just going to get the lens, but was smitten with the D200 and it came home in the bag with the zoom. The D70 was given to my daughter, who still has it, for a trip to Europe she was on the verge of embarking on.
The D200 went with me everywhere. I realized early on it had a tendency to eat batteries, so I bought a battery grip for it, which allowed a full day's shooting, but the proportions of the package were getting big, both size and weight wise.
As the years went by, it saw less and less use simply due to the size and weight, and the years 2010 through 2012 were fairly lean photo wise. When Fuji announced the X100, I was in the UK and I went and handled one in Heathrow airport of all places, but it was neither the time nor the place for that jump. Some time later, pre-sales of the X100s were announced and my name was on the list. Unfortunately it showed up about 2 weeks before I was to make an extended trip overseas for work and I decided to leave it home.... 😭
Upon my return, I embraced the Fuji, but to be kind, it did not embrace me back. Usage was fundamentally different than what I was used to, and if it hadn't been after the return period, I probably would have sent it back. But I had it, so I persevered. I won't lie, it was several months of practice before the shots started to come together.
6 months or so later I was on another trip for work to the San Diego area, and was able to get out early one afternoon. I drove down to Point Lomo State Park as I had heard it was very scenic. When I arrived, it was mid-afternoon and the sun was directly overhead with nary a glimpse of a cloud to be seen. Not optimum photo lighting by any means. In any event, it's a large park, so I walked all around.
About the time I had descended from the top of the hills to the beach area, the weather had turned and a storm was coming in. It was dark and threatening and the light was spectacular. Being a bit trepidatious, I set the X100s to exposure bracketing and started shooting.
When I got home and loaded the shots in LightRoom I was transfixed by what emerged. It was simply amazing. Far and away the best shot I've ever captured.
At that point I knew that I could sell the D200 and accompanying kit.
The X100s has since traveled with me all over the world, Singapore, Sardinia, Scotland, London, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Ireland and the Czech Republic and has never let me down. I am a well and fully hooked Fujista! In the ensuing years an X-Pro2 and a X-T2 have joined the fray with 18mm f2, 35mm f1.4, 10-24 f4, 18-55 f2.8-4 and 55-200 f3.5-4.8 lenses.
Recently, I've become a convert to Capture One as LightRoom and I never really did mesh. Dunno why. I could get what I wanted out the imagery in LR, but it was tedious and time consuming. I'd rather be out shooting than post processing. I tried the Capture One Express Edition for Fuji and was, as they say, hooked. It was amazing how good the RAF's looked literally "out of the box" in C1. Minimal tweaking needed. I subsequently bought the Fuji edition of C1 and then upgraded to the full version. All in, as they say.
The downside of Capture One is cataloging. I'm a Windows user, and Cataloging on the Windows version of Capture One is fundamentally broken. I could deal with the philosophical differences in cataloging with LR if the functionality worked, but it doesn't. So I basically just do development in C1 via an extended session and still use LR for a DAM tool. Luckily v6.14 supports all my cameras at this juncture.
So there it is.
Olaf W. reacted to a post in a topic:
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