Baby On The Deck | Fujifilm 35mm f1.4

I often find myself suffering from insomnia. Last night, I laid in bed until 5 am 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 body’s 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. Occasionally, the grammar police like to stop this site and let me know how dyslexic I am. 🙂

Anyway, my point 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.

Baby On The Deck

It’s sometimes fun to take the most mundane moments in the day and try to see if you can make them interesting 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 every day, even in our own backyard—in my case, a one-bedroom apartment and a balcony in West Los Angeles.

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. When I’m shooting with Fujifilm, I often shoot RAW, then process them to JPEG on the fly by pressing play to preview the shot, Q twice, and 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 clutzes the workflow. So, with the RAW and JPEGs that I manually create, I often find that 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 quite sure what Fujifilm ‘looks’ I want to commit to. Some of the shots in this post are actually from the JPEGs.

I shot RAW for today’s photos, which I took in about ten minutes. I’m glad I did today because Provia worked really well indoors, but outside, Classic Chrome was perfect. I also threw in some Arcos because they always look 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 into Lightroom (as well as Iridient Developer). However, the in-camera JPEGs are usually better since the camera is doing much more than just throwing a filter on the shot, as 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 to work the older cameras; they just don’t have the processing power to make it practical.

For this reason, I really like shooting with Fujifilm JPEGs. They almost always look better when the JPEGs are made in the camera than when the film look is applied in Lightroom.

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.