About Thomas Fitzgerald

Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography. 

Shooting in the Glendalough National Park with a Fuji X-Pro2 and a Hasselblad

Shooting in the Glendalough National Park with a Fuji X-Pro2 and a Hasselblad

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends Hasselblad, and so in order to make the most out of it, I headed to one of my favourite places in the country, Glendalough. I haven’t shot with a medium format film camera before, and I didn’t want to waste too much film, so I brought my X-Pro2 with me aswell, and actually ended up shooting most of the images on that. 

In addition to shooting stills, my wife decided to film my progress too, and so I put it together into this little video, which we’re quite proud of. It was shot by mounting a GoPro onto of a GH2 which was in turn put on a Gorilla pod, which was wrapped around the arm of my wife’s wheelchair. It was funny to look at but it worked really well. We actually shot about 2 hours of footage between the two cameras, and it took me a while to edit it all, but I’m happy with the result. Considering we didn’t plan any of this out, it turned out pretty well. The GoPro is a first generation and the picture quality isn’t great from it, so I did some 8mm and 16mm film emulation on the footage using film convert. 

In terms of the images, I had a devil of a time getting the film scanned, and the results were awful. I left it into the lab and they were supposed to have it that day, but they had some delay. It ended up taking the best part of a week, and the scans they did are terrible. I won’t be going there again. I tried to clean them up a bit in Lightroom and Photoshop, but I would prefer to scan them properly myself. Unfortunately my film scanner only does 35mm, and I don’t have any other way to scan the medium format negatives at the moment. I will look at getting friend to do it when I can get the chance.

As for the X-Pro 2 images, I’m pretty happy with those. I shot mostly on a tripod, and I bracketed everything. I wasn’t 100% happy with a few of the shots, because the 18-55mm is a bit soft at infinity especially when you stop down. I actually don’t have a great selection of lenses for my Fuji so if I had been using one of the wide angle primes I think I would be happier. Anyway, the results are fine. They are mostly processed with Lightroom, but there’s a few images that were created using AuroraHDR too, and a few had some additional treatment with Luminar. 

I’ve posted a selection below, but if you want to see the full gallery, I am trying a new way of posting sing the gallery options on my portfolio website, so you can see the results here. I was also shooting with my D700 and telephoto lens too, and those images are here. It was a productive session !


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You can also show support by buying something from my from my Digital Download Store where I have Lightroom Presets, and e-books available for download. If you're a Fuji X-Trans shooter and Lightroom user, check out my guide to post processing X-Trans files in Lightroom. I also have a guides for processing X-Trans files in Capture One and Iridient Developer. For Sony Alpha shooters I have a new guide with tips on how to get the best from processing your A6000 Images in Lightroom.

My Current Opinions on Available Raw conversion Software (For Fuji Shooters)

My Current Opinions on Available Raw conversion Software (For Fuji Shooters)

Editorial: Elitism in the Online Photographic Community

Editorial: Elitism in the Online Photographic Community