Fuji Good morning from Northern VA

doobs

All-Pro
Location
Williamsburg, VA
Name
Chris
Hello all,

I'm a fairly long term photographer, starting in college many years ago with an Olympus OM-1n. In those days I primarily shot Tri-x and have a plethora of negatives that I now need to digitize, but that's a story for another day.

Dabbling with P & S digital cameras, about 15 years ago when I went for a Nikon D-70. Until some 5 years ago I was a dedicated Nikonista when I bought my first Fuji, a X100s. The Nikon lessons were a bit difficult to forget, as I'm sure most here realize the x100s is a far different imaging/use philosophy.

Coming to grips with the new philosophy was a bit of a struggle for me. Lot's of mis-focus, wrong mode, and other mostly operator error types of issues were evident in my work.

While in San Diego one day about 4 years ago I found myself at Point Loma State Park south of town. A major storm was brewing and the light was amazing.

The contrast was spectacular, and I was trepidatious about getting the right exposure. So the camera was set to bracketing and I went blazing away. Getting home, I picked out a good sequence, did a quick combination in NIK hdr efex and this is what emerged:

PLSP.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)


At that juncture, I realized that I could dispense of all the Nikon gear, as I had found my nirvana.

That X100s has followed me around the world a bit since then. The small size and the amazing imagery just made it second nature to have constantly at hand.

The thing that I missed with the X100s was different lens focal lengths. My wife and I did a UK/Ireland tour in 2016 and there were numerous times that wider view angle and/or more reach would have been a real benefit. Yea, I know about the add-on lenses for the X100's, but honestly they never appealed to me.

We have a family trip scheduled for March to Scotland, so I went looking around to see what my options were. I've alway liked the X-Pro1 so that was the natural direction of inquiry.

I found a dealer not too far from me who was selling new in box X-Pro1's for $500. Grabbing one, the next choice was lens. The initial reaction was the xf 18-55 and I found one, again, on the cheap.

Amusingly enough, the first thing I managed to do was lose the screw in diopter on my first photo walk. :( It's alright though, because I needed a different power anyway. They aren't the easiest thing in the world to find nowadays, but these folks have them:

Voigtlander Bessa Accessory - Diopter Eyepiece

Since then, I've been walking around a bit grabbing shots and spelunking through the menus, which thankfully are fairly similar to the x100s.

A couple of things have become evident in the last couple of months:
  1. The close focusing capability of the 18-55 is nothing near what I'm used to with the x100s. No surprise there, I guess.
  2. The 18-55 hasn't come off of 18mm much :| That has been something of a surprise.
Item 2 has me wondering if the zoom was a good idea. Time will tell. The plus is I got it for a good price so If I have to sell it, I'll prolly still be whole. If the zoom doesn't work out, I'll then have to work out what FL to go for.

I've already tested a 35mm f1.4 which I liked a lot, but that's a lot longer than the 18mm I've been predominantly shooting at. A 23mm might make sense, except for I already have the x100s which is 23mm, so I'm thinking 18mm. Dunno, time will tell.

In any event, this Fuji forum seems to be fairly active, unlike a number of others, which is a big plus.

cheers,
 
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Hi and welcome Chris

I love taking photos when travelling, its one of the reasons why I travel, to take photos.

There's a plethora of glass should you decide to go wider, the 27, 23, 18, 16 and the 14.
The 18-55 is no slouch either and gives you the opportunity to cover various lengths, which is quite handy when you're travelling.

If you're shooting most of the time on 18, maybe get something wider since you already have an 18. Unless of course if 18 is your favourite focal length, there's the 18 f2.
 
Welcome. FWIW I had the 18-55 and the 55-200 zoom combo. I also have the 16 1.4. I sold both zooms and added a 35 and a 90 I will get a 23 soon BUT I will buy another 18-55 first. I miss that lens more than I thought. While I am mainly a prime shooter this zoom to me is a must have for a walk around. It's very sharp and reasonable in low light. In short to my eye it holds it's own in some very strong company and spent more time on my camera than any of my primes just because of it's IQ and convenience. This may be only the second zoom I have sold and bought back the other being the Nikon 80-200 2.8 two touch.
Welcome again, there are very helpful people here who know their stuff. They have helped me in my transition immensely.
 
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Welcome aboard!

You will quickly find that there are no bad lenses in the Fuji lineup. Some are better at different aspects, or have different capabilities. But all are capable of incredible image quality. Also, there are two macro extension tubes if you need to get back some of that close up focus ability with the 18-55.

Welcome again, there are very helpful people her who know their stuff. They have helped me in my transition immensely.
What Tim means is, we're happy to spend your money :D
 
LOL. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I kinda forgot that I had registered here..... Old Timer's disease I guess. :blush:

I was cleaning out some old e-mail last night and came across the activation e-mail and thought, "h'mmm what's that?".

Yikes, need to pay a little closer attention.

To add to my initial post, in the interim I've bought both a 35mm f1.4 and a 20mm f2.0 which are relegated to the X-Pro1 as they are perfectly matched. I came across a X-T1 under warranty last year on e-bay on the cheap so I grabbed it, and the 18-55 f2.8-4.0 sees duties on it. These are well matched as well.

When Fuji had the 55-200mm zooms on sale for $500 in the spring I succumbed to GAS and grabbed one of those :). I've not had a lens with that much reach since I sold the Nikon kit, so developing an eye for it will take a bit of time I suspect. Frequently, I take my dog on walks around a local lake and I've been forcing myself to carry it on those walks. It's a very scenic area with a plethora of available imagery, but honestly I'm still far from comfortable with the focal range so it's been a bit of a challenge thus far.

At this juncture the biggest issue, at least in my "little" mind, is deciding which camera/lens to bring for a particular purpose. The X-T1 is becoming my travel camera as the zoom is an extremely useful tool to have for accommodating differences in views in unfamiliar locales. It's also relatively compact and that makes carrying it through airports and such much easier.

The X-Pro is becoming my local tourist camera (I live in the Washington DC Metro Area). I'll bring both lenses as the close confines of "The District" and areas like Alexandria need flexibility, but don't demand a zoom.

The x100s is becoming my pocket camera for casual occasions due to it's small size. It's funny though, every time I take it out I'm gobsmacked how quiet and smooth the shutter activation is.

Also notable in recent events is a migration of my post processing from LightRoom to Capture One. I've never really gotten comfortable with LightRoom and had decided to stay with v6.17 as it supported all my cameras and I'm not a huge fan of software subscriptions. When Capture One announced the "Fuji Express" edition of Capture One last year I grabbed a copy and installed it.

Even with the limited capabilities of the Express version of C1, the relative ease of getting to my "minds eye" of a particular image was literally a 2 step process. I was hooked, as they say, upon first glance. (Love at first sight?)

When Phase One had the promo for the full Fuji version of C1 for $109 in the spring, I grabbed a copy. Again the added functionality (layers, color tools, etc) so impressed me that I went ahead and upgraded to the full version so I could PP all my files from other cameras as well. So I got the full version of C1 for $209, which not cheap, but is less expensive than the regular price.

Adapting my workflow to C1 has been marginally less successful than adapting my post processing. I liked the catalog management capabilities of LR and naively jumped straight into catalogs with C1. I've got in the neighborhood of 60k images in my warehouse and to be kind this is well beyond the capabilities of the C1 catalog system.

So, I've been doing all my Digital Asset Management (DAM) with LR. I ingest, rename, apply metadata, etc with it. Then I use C1 in session mode, but don't import any files or create new sessions. I merely browse to the new imagery and apply post processing. It seems to work okay, but I need to do some trials to see how everything works out.

I've also been dabbling with xnView MP during this time. Honestly it provides all the capabilities of LR without the penalties. It's more a browser system than a DAM tool, but honestly it does all the asset management I need. Renaming, metadata, exif management etc. If I can find a way to georeference from Google Maps data (I use Jeff Friedl's Geocoding LR for that), then I very well may migrate over solely to xnView MP. Just need to arm twist myself into not using LR just because I paid for it....

The remaining hurdle with C1 is printing. Printing from LR, in conjunction with the Canon printer thingy, was easy and effortless. I'll need to work through this.

Sorry to be so long winded, but felt I owed an update.

Have a great day and I'll be talking with you soon!
 
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More elucidation:

My workflow is firming up and I'm very comfortable with it.

I've combined the information presented in Fcracer's thread about C1 workflow/post processing with Ian York's thread about session management into the cornerstone of my Capture One workflow.

My workflow is now designated into two different steps:

1) Ingest and post processing - Per your information, I create a session on a Samsung EVO USB drive using a file session template. It's set up in a very similar fashion to Ian's patterned after my photo folder arrangement on my NAS box. The images are imported from the SD card to the sesion folder on the SSD.

Once ingested, I go through the Capture folder and move the keepers to the Session folder. I never throw any images away as storage space is dirt cheap, but I definitely like separating the wheat from the chaff if you will.

The keepers are given stars based on the quality and anything with three stars or over is relegated for further post processing. Then fcracers' workflow is put into place and it works very nicely.

The images destined for further usage are processed using an appropriate recipe in C1 and placed in the output folder in an appropriate sub folder.

2) Cataloging - Once I've gone through the first phase, and all is done, I copy the session folder to my NAS box into the appropriate subfolder. Then I import the session into my main Capture One catalog for archival purposes.

This has taken me a while to work through and it provides me the optimum workflow. A majority of the PP'ing work is done locally on my Dell XPS 13 laptop (albeit on a USB driver) and thus is not impacted by wireless network speeds. Once done, the SSD is copied to my NAS with my desktop which has a Gb ethernet connection so it's quite speedy. I can also synchronize this with my LR catalog, but I'm thinking there will be less and less need for that.

It was exercised just this morning as I did part one while sitting at the kitchen table after a ham and eggs breakfast ;)

Thanks to Fcracer and Ian York for their help!
 
So, a year later, much has evolved.

Working in catalog's in Capture One proved to be an exercise in futility.

With the time allotted via the quarantine in March, I dived into going through the 60,000+ images in the warehouse.

As they are all organized by year/data/event, I would go through folder by folder, rating, tweaking and then exporting to a slightly smaller version to Google Photos. There I made albums that I could share with my family.

All went well for a goodly amount of time and then the rot set in. I was about half way through the inventory when the catalog became unstable. I had several crashes within a couple of days, each time losing the work done as the backup catalog had to be restored.

I became very nervous about losing the work done to this juncture, so I decided to migrate away from catalogs.

This took a bit of effort, but using the export function from Capture One, I was able to export my metadata and settings to standalone sidecar files. This effort took several days.

Once done, I closed the catalog and created what I call an omnibus Session. The difference is I don't import files into it, but navigate to the appropriate folder in the folder tree. The first time done, C1 creates previews in a subfolder, but this only needs to be done once.

I lose all the Catalog functionality this way, but so be it.

I've since pressed my copy of LightRoom v6.14 into doing the duty of a DAM. Using some undeclared command line switches, I adapted a LUA script in LR to open an image or folder in Capture One for post processing.

I need to finish tweaking my C1 export recipes to create finished copies under the image folder for inclusion into LR. At this point all works well.

Unfortunately this will all be for naught here soon. I succumbed to GAS and bought a new in box X-Pro2 today as a Christmas present to myself. Unfortunately I don't think this version of LR will support it. Oh well!

cheers all
 
I've since pressed my copy of LightRoom v6.14 into doing the duty of a DAM. Using some undeclared command line switches, I adapted a LUA script in LR to open an image or folder in Capture One for post processing.

I need to finish tweaking my C1 export recipes to create finished copies under the image folder for inclusion into LR. At this point all works well.

Unfortunately this will all be for naught here soon. I succumbed to GAS and bought a new in box X-Pro2 today as a Christmas present to myself. Unfortunately I don't think this version of LR will support it. Oh well!
It will be clumsy perhaps but how about archiving exported JPEGs in LR with a foldering scheme so that you can always find the raw file if you want to develop further. With consistent naming and lua scripts, who knows, shouldn't be too bad?
 
It will be clumsy perhaps but how about archiving exported JPEGs in LR with a foldering scheme so that you can always find the raw file if you want to develop further. With consistent naming and lua scripts, who knows, shouldn't be too bad?
That's pretty much the plan. I'm working on some export recipes for C1 that writes files in sub folders for pushing out to the internet and for printing. That should be easy to synchronize in LR.
 
I succumbed to GAS the other day and bought a new X-Pro2 from Best Buy for $999. It's on it's way here.
Well,

Got an email from them that delivery had been delayed. My optimism for actually recieving the camera is not high.

The email says if it's not delivered by the 26th, they will cancel the order. Not much to do until then...
 
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