Walking around San Francisco for a day is probably one of the best ways to test a camera. I was considering getting an Olympus E-M5 II for this trip but decided I hadn’t done enough with the Fuji X100T yet to start exploring other cameras.
Exploring San Francisco – X100T
It was one of those rare sunny days in San Francisco. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced that before. I’ve been to this city more times than I can count, and it’s been cloudy, overcast, or raining every time. My theory is that it’s because I left my sunglasses at home. I have this rare talent of controlling the weather like that. If I want to produce an amazing sunset, all I have to do is run out of battery power in my camera. I don’t bring a jacket if I want to make it cold and windy. Works almost every time.
So these shots are all JPEG using the standard Provia camera profile with the Color set to -2, Highlights to -2 Soft, and Shadows set to +0, with everything else set to Zero or Off. That seems to be where I’ve landed as my favorite look to work with in post. Sometimes, I’ll move shadows around from +2 Hard to -2 Soft, depending on whether I use other camera profiles, like Velvia or Classic Chrome. With B&W, I usually like to go hard on the Shadows. But I don’t shoot B&W with camera profiles very often.
Fuji X100T With VSCO
I also did something I usually don’t do on most of these. I used the VSCO presets. I often times like to create my own looks but wanted to give some other looks a try for once. VSCO is pretty good for that classic film look but you run the risk of looking like every other Instagram shooter where you blindly cycle through presets until you find one that works for your shot and of course everything is overly faded in a bad way.
Instead, I try to pick a film stock I like that gives the image color and tone that I feel compliments what is going on. Then, I go in and adjust contrast, saturation, and tones before using the adjustment brush to add clarity, contrast, or extra local enhancements to areas I want the eye to be drawn to.
