After 8 months of shooting and developing film, I wanted to dip back into digital photography for the ease of it & cost effectiveness. For a while now I have had the thought of getting a Fuji mirrorless camera, and the the Fuji x100f was my first choice. I took a walk down to London Camera Exchange in Taunton & traded in some old clobber and fronted the rest. The Fuji x100 series are renown for their compact size, fixed 35mm prime lens at f2 and most of all the film simulations built inside. This seemed to be the perfect camera to sit in my bag alongside my film equipment.

I met with Ellie, who is a Fuji shooter and we headed up onto The Quantock Hills just outside to Taunton. We had seen on the weather report the night before there could have been some snow, this we got, but the fog, well that was unexpected. These conditions made great opportunity for clean and atmospheric photos. We wandered around for about an hour and I snapped 163 photos. Since shooting film i’ve learnt to take 2-3 shots of something and move, its makes photography so much more enjoyable. We had initially hoped that we found the highland cows that are on this common, so we will try for these again.

The camera itself for me was totally new apart from setting it up at home. I was impressed with the live view and how fast the auto focus was. The leaf shutter when taking a photo is so quiet, great for catching people unaware. Its makes taking a photo feel more inviting. One awesome feature is being able to switch between a rangefinder and EVF. With this set of images I shot jpeg fine only. The reason I went for a camera like the Fuji x100f is for its renown colours rendered into its jpegs, those Fuji greens are just unique. The aim of this is to give more time to enjoy taking photos and less time editing tedious RAW files, and saving lots of space on my hard drive. With these images I just added a small tone curve, minor highlight & shadow adjustments and a tiny amount of vibrance. It felt effortless. The camera is small and light, with no chunky DSLR feels. I have noticed the battery can be used up quickly, and I was fortunate that it came with 3 battery’s upon purchase with one being brand new. To combat power loss I turned the live view off and this seemed to help a lot.

I am looking forward to seeing what can be done with this camera in the future. The built in film simulations seem great to take edge off with editing and to keep my work flow aligned. For long exposures it even has a built in ND filter at one press of a button. I was really impressed with the black and white emulation, this will encourage me to not shoot in colour all the time. The Fuji x100f will be a great addition on my days out for images where I need that fast AF for moving subjects, clean ISO for low lighting, BTS content for my website and for being able to bulk up those extra photos when i’ve shot my rolls of film. Alongside this I won’t barely know its even in my rucksack.