Fuji X100s: Going Light on the Streets

The Woman on the Bench #1. Barcelona, 2014

I am finding that the Fuji X100s is the bee’s sneeze for street photography.  It is very small, light, and looks like Grandpa’s old rangefinder. You get away with a lot more with this tool than you would with a big, horn-honking DSLR with an obese lens attached.

I can already see that this will be my trend…As cameras continue to pack more and more punch into smaller and smaller boxes, I will be leaving the heavy stuff behind–or at least relegated to the trunk of the car or short day hikes.

With the Fuji, I do miss the nice, big, high quality files created by my D800–they are so wonderfully large and flexible for making tonal adjustments and for cropping…But, what the Fuji lacks in this area it certainly makes up for it in ease of use.

Here is what I do with the Fuji for street photography:

–I set it to manual focus with a min focus distance dialed in to about 5 feet.

–I select Auto ISO to adjust up to 3200 if necessary, keeping a min shutter speed of 1/125. Even at 3200, just a bit of noise reduction makes for perfectly usable images.

–I select an f-stop that will give me decent depth-of-field–usually f/8 or maybe f/11, or even f/16 if there is enough light.

–I have the eye sensor set to ON so I can use either the LCD, or bring the viewfinder up to my eye where I’ll see all of the appropriate info inside the rectangle.

–Finally, I have the camera set to silent mode so no sound or light is emitted when the shutter is tripped.

I am still practicing and find that I miss many, many shots. (It is a timing thing–not really a fault of the tool I am using.) For every 30-40 situations I see that I would like to photograph, I am lucky to come away with one decent image. Practice, practice, practice…and hopefully, with time, my batting average will move more into the Ty Cobb range.