Gallivanting Around With a New Camera
Adventures in Washington with the X-Pro 3
Earlier this month I went camping in the North Cascades with my undergraduate roommates. Extremely, extremely happy with how that trip turned out – basically ~3 days of not worrying about research and resetting my brain, and it's been fairly positive for my productivity and mental health since I've gotten back.
Importantly, we visited a camera store to get a tripod as part of the preparations for that trip. Lo and behold, I came across a used Fujifilm X-Pro 3 that cost an arm instead of an arm and a leg. I'd been eyeing the body as an upgrade from my X-T20 for well over a year at this point, and this felt like the exact kind of trip I'd wanted the camera for. So caution went to the wind, and I walked out with a 15$ tripod and a new camera!
Call it shiny object syndrome, but I've been extremely happy with the body since I've gotten it. I know that having to flip out the back screen is a source of annoyance for many people, but I've honestly enjoyed it? I had a phase in junior/senior year where I enjoyed shooting film on a Minolta XG-1, and really fell in love with the idea of "shooting and moving on" without the option of "chimping" shots through the back screen.
Sadly, the main drawbacks of film for me were the things most people love about it (development time, inflexibility w.r.t ISO and white balance). The fact that you can't see the screen of the X-Pro 3 by default pretty strongly deters chimping, and while you can absolutely achieve the same effect with other cameras through discipline and willpower, it's definitely increased the immersion I feel when shooting. I do flip out the screen from time to time to play with film simulations and white balance, but I've been enjoying the practice of coming home with very little idea of how my shots turned out and going through it on my computer as a wind-down routine.
The hybrid OVF/EVF rangefinder is also killer – I can see why people pay so much for it on the X100VI! Whether I think the price is proportional to the value on that camera is a different question (I do not think so), but it's nice to be able to both preview what my shot will look like while having the option to see what "slice" of my FoV I'm capturing. I have a fairly bad habit of getting very sucked into the EVF and missing the forest for the trees, so swapping into the OVF when first composing a shot has helped. There's been more than a couple of times that I've realized that I want to clip something off that was at the fringe of the frame, or that there's something slightly out-of-frame that I'd prefer to re-compose with.
I do know that some people have issues with the rangefinder feeling a little odd ergonomically, but I've actually preferred it to the X-T20, as my arms feel a little less crammed into my chest. Though that is also probably partially due to the camera being wider. That does come with some additional heft (plus the fact that the construction is now titanium instead of plastic), but it hasn't been prohibitively heavy. I made it through a fairly strenuous hike (by my standards, at least) while carrying this camera and a spare lens, and have also been fairly comfortable walking around campus with it slung around my neck.
So yeah, overall, very very happy with this camera. I've been making more of an active effort to get out and go on photo-walks while campus is deserted (and social anxiety is slightly lower), and it's been an absolute joy to shoot on this thing.
For the record – do I think that I wouldn't have enjoyed shooting on my old X-T20? Absolutely not. I do think that there are some shots where it would have been harder to shoot on it by virtue of the fact that I might have gotten too absorbed into the EVF, but that's not really an indictment of the camera. Photography in general is enjoyable more because of the creative process than the gear, and the X-T20 doesn't really limit that process in any meaningful way. Most modern cameras (post-2012, I want to say?) are capable of getting out shots with sufficient pixel density and color accuracy, so you might as well get whatever the cheapest camera is that you enjoy shooting with. But there's also something to be said for having a camera that makes you want to get up and take pictures with it, and for a variety of reasons the X-Pro 3 evokes a fairly strong feeling of that from me.
Anyway, I also wanted to share some highlights from the camera roll from our trip (the main reason this is categorized Long and not Short). Enjoy my show-and-tell into the internet void! Most shots below were taken on my beloved XF35mm F1.4, with some additional landscape shots taken on the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8. Everything is SOOC, so a crop-n-tilt and color adjustments may be due in the future.
North Cascades Pictures
I was the designated cameraman™ for the roommates' Seattle trip (largely through self-imposition, for the record). We went camping for three days – the first was spent packing/road-tripping to the campsite, the second was spent hiking, and the third was spent kayaking. I mostly took pictures on the second day because I was too scared to take a new camera into the middle of a lake, and the pool of water in my kayak asserted that to be a good decision. I did get some fun shots on our way into the national park though.
Amateur tip: sitting shotgun and setting shutter speed to 1/2000 or higher can get you some really nice pictures on scenic road trips, clean windshield permitting.
I was pretty shocked when we hit our first viewpoint on the drive in. Apparently water can turn this tealish-green color because of glacial sediment – the more you know!
This was also the closest I'd been to a snow-capped mountain in a long time, so I spent a solid amount of time staring up at those.
The main event was a loop of the Maple Pass trail. The route is absolutely beautiful, albeit a bit steep for sedentary grad students (I wonder who that could be?). I started feeling a solid amount of struggle about a third in, but the first lookout was a much-needed shot in the arm.
This picture is somewhat emblematic of some of the struggles I had taking pictures throughout the hike. I wanted to get as much of the landscape as possible, which is inherently a very deep thing to shoot, so I resorted to vertical shots a lot. At the same time, properly exposing the snow, greenery, and rock faces all at once was a tall task, and not one I'd read the manual enough at the time to tackle. So there are quite a few ethereally blown-out snowcaps and clouds.
I did, however, get this shot of my friends taking a break which I thought was pretty cool. You can once again see that exposure was a challenge.
It's not super clear from the pictures because I wasn't taking a lot of them initially and didn't want to hold up my friends, but the first part of our hike was through a really twisty forest section. At some point we broke out of the forest and entered a section I lovingly referred to as "Lord of the Rings" because of the way the greenery and lighting looked. At this point I also received reassurance that it was okay if I hung back a little and took my time taking pictures, so I got some decent shots of the terrain while we hiked.
A little farther into lord-of-the-rings, and we started to see some pretty huge rock faces.
We didn't realize it at the time, but we hit the best lookout/vantage point a little bit after that. It's a little hard to recollect exactly how I felt seeing this with my own two eyes, but quite a few "holy shits" and "oh my gods" were muttered while sitting on a rock.
This was also about the point that we realized that we still had about half the hike to go (a little more upwards then the entire downclimb), so we all picked up the pace a little at that point. As a result, the number of pictures taken declined rather rapidly, but there are a couple shots that I'm glad I took during the hurry.
As an aside, we'd mostly been hiking through in tshirts and pants by this point. So staring at what seemed to be a scene straight out of an Indian movie's Europe shooting while wearing my standard work attire was pretty crazy.
This shot has a snakey leading line going through it that I liked. Plus my friend using his hiking stick as a golf club was kinda funny.
And arguably my favorite shot from this trip:
In hindsight I might have cropped off a little more of the sky, but it gives the people some breathing room, which I kind of like. Coincidentally this was also the last decent shot I took of our hike, since the footing was quite unstable during the downclimb and we were really trying to beat the light at that point. Case in point, here's a weirdly exposed shot of the sunset light before we'd even made it back into the forest.
Closing Thoughts
If it wasn't already apparent, we made it back before dark, and no major issues were had getting back to our campsite. The kayaking trip the next day was just as enjoyable, if a little less picturesque, though there are fewer visual records of that excursion.
If I were to summarize this post so far:
TL;DR: X-Pro 3 good, did not know how to use it fully during the trip so pictures were less than ideal, North Cascades are absolutely beautiful.
I'd actually bought the camera right before we started driving, so I didn't have a ton of time to figure out the features of it that were different than my X-T20 and generally didn't have a great feel for how to best take advantage of it. The weekend after I got home, I finally sat down and read through the entire manual, configuring all the settings in a way that felt intuitive to me. This helped feel more comfortable when I went out on photowalks, and I've been taking pictures around campus that I'm much more satisfied with from a quality perspective.
This post was initially intended to be a super-cut of all the pictures I'd enjoyed taking this month, including the improved ones from when I got back to campus, but the hike section ended up being way longer than I'd initially anticipated! Plus it's kinda fun recounting the experiences and thoughts that came along with the shots.
I'm hoping to make a second post sometime in the next few weeks about the pictures I've taken since coming back to campus, since I had a bit more creative freedom when taking those to play with framing and whatnot.
In the meantime, I hope this post was some mixture of informative and entertaining. It's a beautiful world out there, and we ought to take more pictures of it!