I’m on a photography lockdown right now. My main laptop died this weekend, and then my main photo editing drive died as I was moving files around to be able to work on my old MacPro. So I’m stuck until I fix my MacBook Pro and until my Drobo comes this week. I hope recovering the hard drive will be easy. It just lost its partition. If not, I have backups.
Kalina, The Bunny Rabbit – XT1
These are a few shots of my daughter in her little Bunny costume. I used the Fujifilm XT1 and the Fujinon 56mm f1.2 lens, an amazing combo.
Why did I use the Fujifilm over my Sony A7r II?
You might think I’m crazy for not shooting with the Sony A7r II, whose specs completely outperform any Fujifilm camera.
But there is a good reason, and you’ll see me talk about it occasionally. The reason is Fujifilm’s unspoken magical quality: the colors.
I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s true: you can’t match the colors you get from Fujifilm. You could say it’s from X-Trans, or you could say it’s because they’ve defining the look of history for 80 years and they’ve baked that into their profiles. Whatever it is, it’s there and it’s a real thing that can’t just be measured by some number or stat.
The color in these photos is almost entirely outside the camera. I did shoot RAW but selected Provia in the Lightroom camera profile selection. I know it’s not the same as shooting JPEG with Provia, but it’s close enough. You can see my RAW vs. JPEG comparison here.
Even though I only get 16 megapixels, the beauty of the shot makes it worth it. Besides, I don’t really need 42 megapixels for a shot like this anyway. Does anybody else?
My Gear
It took me a long time to figure out what kind of lights to get. It came down to Elinchrome vs Paul C Buff Einsteins. While built quality of the Elinchrome might be better of the Einstiens, I choice the Einstein’s for one reason; When you’re light breaks, you send it to a service center in the United States. I’ve heard only bad things about sending Elinchrome lights in for repair, so I avoided them.
I shot this with two Einsteins, one with a Westcott Rapid Box Octa XL, the other was a small Paul C Buff strip box I used for fill.
At ISO 200, f1.4, I had to turn the lights almost down to their lowest setting.
