Cooking Tomatillos – South Weber, UT – Fujifilm X100F – Astia
I mentioned last month that I sometimes photograph my wife’s culinary creations. Last night she boiled some tomatillos to make make chile verde, which was absolutely delicious! After she placed the tomatillos in a pot of water, she waved me over to show me how beautiful it looked. She saw the photographic potential, and, as soon as she shared it with me, I saw it, too.
The great thing about having a Fujifilm X100F is that it’s easy to grab and capture a beautiful picture without fuss. The camera does well in whatever situation I throw it in, and produces great results that don’t require any computer software. Cooking Tomatillos is a straight-out-of-camera high-ISO JPEG. It has a film-like aesthetic, yet it’s much better looking than if I had captured this image with actual 35mm film.
After capturing the image, I wirelessly uploaded it from my the camera to my phone, and then uploaded it from my phone to the internet. Within five minutes after making the exposure I could share it to whoever I wanted around the world. That’s amazing to me! Not just because technology allows one to share an image across the globe quickly, but that I can share a high-quality finished photograph quickly. Before I would have had to load the RAW file onto my computer and mess around with it for awhile in software before I would dare share it with anyone.
A couple of days ago I was out driving around and saw a white horse standing on the ridge of a hill. It just looked incredible–beautiful and majestic–and the landscape was bleak from winter. I wanted to capture it, and I knew my 10-year-old daughter, who is all about horses, would love the image, so I parked the car in the dirt along the road and got out.
White Stallion – Mountain Green, UT – Fujifilm X100F
Whenever I’m out and about I try to carry my X100F with me, whether I think that I might photograph something or not. I grabbed the camera and headed down a trail that got me a little closer to the horse. The hill was very muddy and I wasn’t able to get all that near the animal, so I used the Digital Teleconverter to “zoom” to 75mm. Click!
Unfortunately I had the film simulation set to Velvia, which was not the look that I wanted, and I didn’t realize this until after I snapped the picture. I was in too much of a hurry. It didn’t take me long to change to Acros, but by the time I did the horse had turned away and was beginning to leave. Not a big worry, I wirelessly uploaded the picture from the camera to my phone, then did a black-and-white conversion (with some other quick edits) using Snapseed, then uploaded it from my phone to the internet. The whole process only took a few minutes. And the JPEG file held up plenty well to the editing.
Because it’s small and lightweight and surprisingly versatile, the X100F makes images like these possible. I might have captured them if I had a DSLR instead, and I might not have. What I can tell you for sure is that I never would have had so quickly a finished picture ready to share. The files would likely still be sitting on an SD card in the camera, or perhaps in a folder on the computer waiting in line to be post-processed.
I was able to show my daughter White Stallion when I got home, and she loved it every bit as much as I thought she would. She wants to hang it on her bedroom wall. That’s what makes the X100F so good, and that’s why I own it.