Baby On The Deck

ISO 200, f1.4, 1/1800

I often find myself suffering from insomnia. Last night I laid in bed until 5am with my brain just buzzing until I finally gave in and took a sleeping pill. I usually just take melatonin and then I’m fine but I ran out. I think, the insomnia has something to do with what I eat but I’m not positive. I could imagine some sort of allergy that would send the bodies system into fight or flight and maybe prevent it from sleeping. Or maybe, I just switched brands of coffee and was getting a bigger dose than I thought. Who knows. What I do know is when I was eating Paleo for two years I never had any issues with anxiety, headaches or insomnia and my dyslexia was a lot less severe. Every once in a while the grammar police likes to stop this site and let me know how dyslexic I am. 🙂

Anyway, my point of telling you that is that today, I was tired and lazy and didn’t want to do anything. So I just had a little fun shooting my daughter playing on the deck with the Fujifilm X-T2 and the 35mm f1.4 lens.

It’s sometimes fun to take the most mundane moments in the day and try to see if you can make anything interesting out of them with photography. Often as photographers we get stuck thinking we need to travel to capture life’s great and unique moments, not realizing we all live as part of our own unique culture and it’s around us everyday even in our own back yard – in my case, a one bedroom apartment and a balcony in West Los Angeles.

ISO 200, f1.4, 1/11000

RAW vs JPEG

I’m going to get into this topic in a later post, but it’s been a hot debate this last week. What I often do when I’m shooting with Fujifilm is shoot RAW then process them to JPEG on the fly by pressing play to preview the shot, Q twice, then ok. This makes a JPEG with the shot settings in less than a second.

Sometimes, I’ll shoot RAW+JPEG but I don’t like doing this as it wastes space and makes the workflow too cluttered. So, with this RAW and JPEGs that I manually create, I often find I don’t need the RAWS. Actually, when I’m shooting casually like today, I often just use JPEG unless I’m in a situation where I’m not quit sure what Fujifilm ‘look’ I want to commit too. Some of the shots in this post are actually from the JPEGs.

ISO 200, f1.4, 1/1400

With today’s photos that I took in about ten minutes, I was shooting RAW. I’m glad I did today because Provia worked really well while indoors, but outside Classic Chrome was perfect and I also threw in some Arcos because it always looks great.

When shooting RAW, a nice advantage you have is that you can switch your film simulators around as you go because the profiles are built in to Lightroom (as well as Iridient Developer). However, the in-camera JPEGs are usually better since the camera is doing a lot more than just throwing a filter on the shot like the profiles in Lightroom do. The Fujifilm cameras actually analyze each image and apply the grade based on the characteristics of each shot. This is why Fujifilm can’t get some of the new film simulators working the older cameras; they just don’t have the processing power to make it practical.

So for this reason, I really like shooting with Fujifilm JPEGs. They almost always look better when the JPEGs are made in the camera compared to applying the film look in Lightroom.

ISO 200, f1.4, 1/550

The Fujifilm 35mm f1.4

The more I use the Fujifilm 35mm f1.4 the more I really like it. It has such a unique look that just can’t get out of the Fujifilm 35mm f2. Of course the f2 is slower, but I don’t always shoot wide open like I did here. Maybe I’ll bring it back out for a shoot for a few days now that I’m use to this 35mm f1.4 and see if I can have a fresh look at it.

Today I also shot a bit with my X-Pro 2 which pairs very nice with the 35mm f1.4. I actually haven’t been posting photos from that camera lately since I’ve been busy dealing with a negative SEO attack on my site this last month and it’s kept me pretty busy with all the technical nonsense that involves running a website in a competitive niche. In my case it’s likely from doing all my memory card tests, which helps people find the best memory cards for their cameras. Before that I was in Alaska for a month and before that I was cutting trailers for Destiny 2. So it’s been a busy year, it always is I guess.

Luminar 2018 Is Here!

I’m trying to get back to posting more. Luminar 2018 just came out and it has all these new workspace setups that are built for different tasks; including Street Photography with new LUTs and a new Matte look.

I really wanted to use it on these photos, but I was just too tired and don’t have the brain capacity today to dabble in new tools. Actually, there are so many new tools that every time I open it, I get lost playing around while spending hours just messing with a few photos with all the new tools. It’s the most extreme case of new toy syndrome for me.

Check out my current Luminar review. I’ll have to update it with all the new tools very soon!