Given what I wrote in my previous post – plus the fact that I don’t feel like going to sleep yet, I thought it would be worthwhile to read back through some Fuji X-Pro1 reviews – and share the links with you.  So here goes, in vaguely random order:

Over at Zackarias.com, there’s a review and sample photos from all over the world – including a shoot that he did for Land Rover using the camera. “I will never travel on vacation with a DSLR again. Ever. Seriously. If you want a travel camera, this is your travel camera. No question about it.”

Ken Rockwell weighs in. “The X-Pro1 is an excellent camera for people photos and for people who want a lightweight camera that performs as well or better than DSLRs.”

My buddy Fernando Gros wonders if the X-Pro1 can replace a DSLR. “The best answer I can give is – maybe.”  Elsewhere, he used the camera to take some really stunning InfraRed shots – you really have to see these.  Overall, he seems to be liking it. “I still have my reservations. But, it’s fair to say that when everything “clicks” the camera produces some amazing images.”

The Digital Journal of Photography posts their first impressions and sample shots.

Imaging Resource has an extended review. “… a surprisingly excellent digital camera system that we recommend very highly to anyone who enjoys photography enough to try something new.”

DigLloyd has covered the X-Pro1 in several posts.  Herehe writes, “I’m finding that the dynamic range is excellent with the Fuji X-Pro1. But the sharpness is inexplicably poor …”  And here he writes, “The Fuji X-Pro1 has some fine qualities (fundamental sensor quality looks very good), but at present it is simply too frustrating to work with its images, not one of which has anything approaching the sharpness of what should be there with a 16MP camera.  This isn’t just me— a number of users have emailed to say ‘“it’s going back”. I’ll be flabbergasted if it succeeds in the market.”  And yet elsewhere he wrote, “In terms of sensor quality, the X-Pro1 sensor at ISO 200 seems to be superior to the Canon 5D Mark III at ISO 100, in tonality and low noise.”  And in another post, “The Fuji X-Pro1 pixel quality at ISO 200 is extremely impressive.”

Todd Owyoung did an initial review. “ To me, this kind of camera seems perfect for someone doing travel and personal photography.”  He followed that with a much more in-depth one with lots of sample photos.  ”For many photographers, Fuji has released the camera that Nikon users wished they had gotten in the V1/J1 models, and which Leica users might prefer over the aging Leica M9.”

Engadget has a pretty good review. “The Fujifilm X-Pro1 is a work of art, and like any masterpiece there’ll be some who hate it and others who get into heated bidding wars.”

Photohead Online has some example portrait shots that are quite nice. “Overall this camera is a great image making tool.”

Steve Huff Photo has a review by Ashwin Rao, with lots of photos.  ” Fuji’s X-Trans sensor simply friggin’ Rocks.”  But he notes that the auto focus is slow (while many have noted that the manual focus is all but useless).

The Verge says, “The Fujifilm X-Pro1 does almost everything right.”

So mostly positive but far from unanimous raves.  Honestly, if I still was making the salary I was making 3 years ago, this would be in my hands now.  But I’m not and I’m not feeling quite ready to jump into this pool yet.  What about you?  If you’ve read all this stuff and you’re thinking about buying, then consider clicking on these links to buy it from B&H Photo or from Amazon.

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The Monochrom is essentially a special version of the M-9.  Presumably because it’s being produced in smaller numbers than the M-9, it also costs $1,000 more.  That’s right, the body alone costs $8,000.  There but for the grace of Buddha go I.  Yes, I don’t do a lot of street photography.  I want to do more.  And I love black & white photography, just as I love black and white films (especially when properly transferred to Blu-Ray by companies such as Criterion).  But none of this justifies selling my car in order to be able to afford this camera plus a Leica lens.

Because it’s black and white only, it means it doesn’t need a filter array to collect color information when shooting.  Without that array, what you’re left with is apparently outstanding sharpness not to mention unmatched high ISO performance.  Just how good is it?  Hit these links to see some sample photos.

Shoot Tokyo – these are my favorites

Eric Kim – link in this post to a some outstanding photos done by a Magnum photographer in Russia

Eric Kim again

Photography Blog – here and here 

Steve Huff  - here and here

Leica makes some odd choices though, don’t they?  Stunning lenses, stunning sensor – and then they equip their cameras with the cheapest LCD screen possible.  A friend of mine who is blessed with a Leica M-9 says he doesn’t care, he doesn’t use the LCD screen for shooting.  I suppose that might be true but to me, that’s not the point.  The point is, you charge $8,000 for a camera, everything there should be top of the line.  It makes no sense to charge this sort of money and then slap on an LCD screen that’s inferior in just about every possible way to the screen you get on the back of a $200 Casio.

Doesn’t matter.  I cannot afford a Leica camera body and I also cannot afford Leica lenses.  (Not unless more of you readers start clicking on some of the ads and links here and start actually buying stuff!)(Oh, here’s the link to buy the Leica Monochrom from B&H Photo.)

That being said, I do possess a pretty darned good camera for street photography, the Fuji X100.  The only limitation is that it is a single, fixed focal length lens – 23mm (35mm equivalent is, er, 35mm).  And so because of that, I also have the Sony NEX-7, which of course has interchangeable lenses.

What happened last week was I took a weekend trip, only wanted to carry one camera and one lens, and so I took the Sony rather than the Fuji, and I took the Sony 18-55mm lens, which is not a good lens at all on the NEX-7 but is the only zoom lens I have for this camera.  I didn’t have too much opportunity for shooting during the weekend but I did manage a couple of nice shots here and there.

(Taken at the Greenbelt Mall in Makati, Manila, they were setting up the outdoor area for an event that night.  These guys, a local band that specializes in Brazilian Batucada music, were posing for pictures taken by a friend and I ran over, waved, and got a few shots of them.  They asked me if I wanted to be their manager.)

Actually, looking at the above picture in Lightroom, I’m pretty unhappy with it.  It’s not tack sharp anywhere (cheap Sony lens) and there’s a surprising amount of noise consider it was shot at ISO 200.

It got me thinking, might I be better off with the Fuji X-Pro1?  I mean, if I sold off the X100 and the NEX-7 (and the three lenses I have for it), that would almost give me enough money to buy the X-Pro1 and the three lenses that are available for it so far.  I know that the X-Pro1 has not received universally good reviews – mostly on its handling quirks and not its performance, and since I find the X100 a joy to use, I suspect I’d have a similar experience here.

(Hey! You!  You can click here to buy the Fuji X-Pro1 from B&H Photo. Or you can click here to buy it from Amazon.)

There is no zoom lens available for this Fuji yet, just three fixed focal length lenses – 18mm, 35mm and a 60mm macro.

What there is though is a new adapter from Fuji to put Leica lenses on the X-Pro1.  This adapter includes electronic contacts for passing info about the lens back to the camera.  Pretty sweet and at $200, not too expensive.  Which brings me back to the “I cannot afford Leica lenses” bit.  And also the fact that, so far at least, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop cannot handle X-Pro1 RAW files, though I expect that will change in the relatively near future.

So relative sanity prevails, at least for now.

Here’s a shot of those batucada guys rehearsing.

They actually sounded pretty good.  Maybe I should have taken them up on their offer to manage them.

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You may find this hard to believe but this shot was taken from the 4th floor of a car park in the middle of Sai Kung town.  It’s one of the few spots I know where one can get an unobstructed view of the mountains that mark the district’s border.

Once a year they close down one of the streets in town and build a huge theater out of bamboo and corrugated tin for Cantonese opera and that time of year is now.  I managed to get this one photo before someone ran up and stood in front of me with her arms crossed and a very stern expression on her face.  Oh well.

We sat outdoors across from the theater for lunch.  I took some pictures of people passing by – mostly their backs because they were staring at the theater.  And then I got a shot of this guy, whom I’ve dubbed Mr. Cool.

It was freaking hot today, wish I’d brought a fan too.

My dog Bogey (as in Humphrey Bogart) always gets a lot of attention when I bring him to town.  This little boy, wearing a Snoopy t-shirt, was shy at first and then couldn’t stop petting him.

Tip – a dog is a great way to get people to come to you and while people are busy looking at the dog, you can get busy taking pictures of them.

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It was a week night and my eyes were weak, tired from work.  Even using magnified LiveView with a Hoodman Loupe, I was having trouble getting sharp focus.  I can’t really say if it was due to the fact that it was a bit windy at times and I was shooting pretty long exposures or if it was just that I wasn’t able to quite lock things in focus-wise.  This shot was the sharpest shot of the night.

Nikon D800, Nikon 70-200mm F2.8 lens at F8, ISO 100, 6 seconds.

Many of my shots look quite good when you view the photo on screen but if you zoom in to actual pixels, they’re not quite tack sharp.

This shot, for example, is pretty darned close, but the part that’s in really sharp focus is the lower left corner.

Or am I just being too critical?

This shot, a moment later, quite okay I think.

Bringing stuff down to black & white yields a pretty decent result, too.

And I like this one, as long as I don’t zoom in on it.

I’d missed the chance to shoot the “super moon” on May 5th because it was 100% cloud cover where I live.  So three days later, not so super, not so full, darting in and out of the clouds, but I managed a couple of nicely detailed moon shots.

Oddly enough, when I later switched to my 70-300mm lens, focus was consistently sharper.  I didn’t shoot as many pictures with this lens because it was getting late. (Lights on the major buildings start shutting off around 11 PM.)

A couple of observations:

Have you ever tried bracketing focus?  Cameras have settings for bracketing different settings – but not focus.  But I suppose I could do that manually.  Take three shots with the focus just slightly changed from shot to shot; rather than shooting just one and hoping that when I get back home it will look okay.  Another option might be tethering, though I think that sort of set-up might prove cumbersome on a dark mountain top at night, surrounded by people and cars coming and going.

I also think I would get some benefit from HDR here – the mega-huge signs tend to burn out and some HDR magic would tone those down and make them more legible.

And … I didn’t bring my 14-24mm lens with me and I should have.

One last photo for now, a close-up shot of the Mega-Box shopping mall in Kowloon Bay.

I suppose the main thing is that I have so much fun doing this and it’s just a short drive so I’ll presumably have lots of opportunities to go back and try different things and hopefully get better results with each successive visit.

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Here’s the deets:  Nikon D800, Nikon 70-200mm F2.8 lens at 112mm, ISO 100, F8, 8 seconds.  It looks okay when you view it this way but zoom in and it’s not tack sharp (except for the bottom left corner).

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This is a bit embarrassing but I’ve been living here for more than a year and never noticed these bananas growing along side the road.  I think I simply pay more attention when I’m walking with a camera in my hands, constantly looking everywhere for something that might make an interesting shot.

My previous home featured a breathtaking open sea view.  My current home is surrounded by mountains but this view is a 10 minute walk for me.

In a crop from the above, I drive past this abandoned factory building every day.  It’s surrounded by a chain link fence.  I’m wondering if there’s some break in the fence somewhere that would allow me to get some photos inside.  I’ll take a closer look one of these days.

I’ve also got a small film studio just down the road from me.  No idea how they feel about random people walking up with a camera but maybe one day I’ll try it.

And I’ve got absolutely no idea what the heck this thing is.

This butterfly flew by, I swung the camera up and grabbed a shot and then saw my settings.  By the time I had changed the shutter speed to something much faster, it had flown off.  The shot looks okay enough as long as you don’t zoom in on it.

Roots.

Yeah, nothing earth shattering.  Waiting for a clearer day to return to the mountain top or the harbor.

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Technical details:  Nikon D800, Nikon 12-24mm F2.8 lens at 22mm, ISO 100, F8.0, 3 seconds.

By the way, all of these shots were done with manual focus (using the LiveView magnification mode) and then shot in Mirror Lockup mode.

Here’s a crop from the above, some color added back in.

The resolution of the D800 just blows me away.  I feel a whole new wave of creativity being unleashed within me.

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Technical details:  Nikon D800, Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 55mm, ISO 100, f8, 8 seconds.

I also like the same shot rendered in black & white:

And here’s a crop from the first version:

More to come!

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The moon over Sai Kung.  Please do take a moment to look at the photo large size to see the detail.  Because I’ll tell you, when I loaded this into Lightroom and took a look at it, I was pretty damned happy.

Technical details?  Nikon D800 of course.  The longest lens I own is the Nikon 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 and that’s what I used, zoomed all the way to 300mm.  I went for ISO 100, F8.0 aperture and took a guess at the shutter speed and went with 1/160th of a second.  Manual focus.  Mirror lock-up mode.  I took a few shots (the moon kept getting covered by clouds) and when I looked at this one and magnified it, I knew I was done for the night.

To give you an idea of just how much of a crop that is, here’s the uncropped shot:

(In terms of post production, aside from cropping, all I did was bump up the exposure 1/4 stop and tiny bumps on the Highlights and Clarity sliders.  No additional sharpening.)

Now, to give you an idea of what a HUGE difference the manual focus + image magnification in LiveView makes, you might recall a shot I tried on my first night with the camera.  Here’s tonight’s version, just slightly cropped:

This is the same 70-300mm lens, zoomed out to 82mm, 100 ISO, F8, 10 seconds.  Here’s a detail from the above shot.

Noticeably sharper.  And now here it is with a smidge of sharpening and a bit of noise reduction, just for the hell of it:

One last pair of shots.  This is a village about a mile or more away from me, nestled on a mountain side, I see its lights every night.  (I think this is Pik Uk Village.)

125mm, ISO 100, F8, 10 seconds.  I had a difficult time framing this (I hate the tripod head I’ve got at the moment) and the only thing I could see to focus on, even with the magnification, was the lights in the village so I was basically.  Here’s a crop from the above:

Not too shabby.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m going to be having dinner at Cucina in Tsim Sha Tsui.  If you know this restaurant, you know it is right next to an outdoor deck facing out onto HK harbor.  So weather permitting (and if I don’t drink too much!) I plan to set up the tripod there and take harbor shots after dinner.  You might say this is what I’ve been getting ready for.

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A shot taken outside the mall while grabbing a smoke, a momentary break in the clouds.

Here’s a shot taken through the shopping mall window of something new being built.

Shooting through a distant window may (or may not) be why the image isn’t tack sharp.

The Megabox mall in Hong Kong features one of the city’s few ice skating rinks.  If you’re on the same floor as the rink, you’re observing it through a dirty plastic protective barrier.  If you’re on a floor above, then there’s this huge net that gets in the way.

Just for the heck of it, a few crops from the above picture.

I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about the D800.  It’s interesting to see other peoples’ perspectives (almost universally positive, of course) as well as pick up some hints and tips.

I’d previously linked to this review on the Luminous Landscape site.  There’s a few things worth repeating from that review:

… do spend some time with the manual to familiarize yourself with what the camera can and can’t do. This is probably the most feature-rich camera that I’ve ever used.

– Use the optimum aperture. Apertures above about f/11 introduce diffraction which effectively acts as an unintentional AA filter

– When shooting hand-held use lenses with VR when possible, and also a high shutter speed… 2X or 3 X the reciprocal of the focal length, not the 1/focal length of olden days

– Use the lowest possible ISO, though as we’ll see the camera is very clean up to and including ISO 1600

He’s also got a bit about performing lens alignment that makes sense and I think I might invest in the Datacolor DC SLC100 SpyderLensCal Calibration System (get it from Amazon or from B&H Photo) or the LensAlign MkII Focus Calibration System (get it from Amazon or from B&H Photo).  They’re not that expensive and it looks as if they’ll be helpful.

There’s another new post on Luminous Landscape called An Embarrassment of Riches. Mark Dubovoy’s starting point is that there are some amazing cameras out there in the market now and I agree.  Along with the Nikon D800 I have the Sony NEX-7 and the Fuji X100 and these are easily the three best cameras I have ever owned.  (Do check Dubovoy’s post to see some amazing shots taken with the NEX-7 in Machu Picchu.)

Dubovoy starts by saying that he never liked the film SLR format, that he always thought of it as a low resolution, cheaper approach than medium format cameras.  So why does he like the D800?

For me the Nikon D800/D800E is a game changer.  Why?  Because it is the first 35 mm size camera that exceeds my threshold of image quality for exhibition prints. I have shot hundreds of tests, and in test after test the image quality is surprisingly good. The D800 delivers not just high resolution, but also outstanding dynamic range, extremely low noise and world class color accuracy and sensitivity. I would not hesitate to make 40 or even 50 inch wide exhibition prints from D800 files. Believe me, to go from a large format film view camera to a D800/800E for exhibition prints in a little over a decade is a bit shocking, but such is the incredible pace of innovation in our medium.

I believe that this camera represents the first product of a new era in digital photography.

He also repeats some of the advice from Reichmann’s review:

Shooting at the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens is not good enough-even with a VRII lens.  I would recommend multiplying the focal length of the lens times 3X and using the reciprocal of this number as the minimum shutter speed for maximum handheld quality.

And he’s noticed the same thing that I have about the auto-focus.

The autofocus in the camera is excellent (also the best I have used to date) but it is still not as good as manual focusing using Live View.  I would recommend using manual focus at high magnification in Live View mode whenever circumstances permit.

And he concludes:

The Nikon D800/D800E is an instrument that commands respect and needs to be used with utter care and flawless technique in order to extract all it has to offer.  Those that use the camera in this manner, will be rewarded with superb image quality;  image quality that was heretofore unthinkable from such a small camera.

In financing my D800 purchase, I have to sell off my D700.  (Please ping me if interested.)  This is not an easy thing for me to do.  The camera is fabulous and I had two years of taking (what I think are) great shots with it.  I’d prefer to hold onto it but financially it’s just not feasible.  Nevertheless, I had a difficult time hitting the “publish” button when I posted an ad over on DCFever.

I also momentarily contemplated selling off my Fuji X100.  I don’t absolutely need it.  I could get by with just the NEX-7 as a daily walking around camera.  But the X100 is a very different beast from the NEX-7 and I decided that I can’t part with it just now.

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