Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged X-Pro2
I discovered the other day, quite by accident, that my Fuji X-Pro 2 is two years old this week. Tomorrow in fact. What a few years it has been. I’ve had ups and downs with the camera, but it’s also been good to me. Writing about it and processing Fuji files has undoubtedly made a name for me in certain corners, and I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if it hadn’t been for buying that camera.
There’s an issue that can occur with Fuji cameras when you go to charge the battery. The light on the charger flashes, and instead of charging the battery, it will drain it completely. I’ve had this problem a couple of times now, and at first, I thought there was something wrong with my battery, but it turns out that it’s a fairly common issue with the charger. I’ve googled it and researched the problem, and while it’s fairly well known, as is typical with such things, there’s a wide range of conflicting opinions as to the cause and solution. So here’s what I found works for me…
One of the highly anticipated new features in the latest Firmware update for the X-Pro 2 was the addition of highlight clipping warning in Live view. While you could get the “blinkies” previously in playback, there was no option to see them in live view until now. After you install firmware 4.0, you still need to enable it in the menu in order to turn it on.
With the release of firmware 4.0, the Fuji X-Pro 2 now supports 4K video. I did some quick testing, recording some footage in some local parks. There is a mix of hand held and tripod. All was shot using ProNeg Standard as the film profile. There was some very light colour correction done in Final Cut Pro as well as a custom profile to give the footage a slight grade, but this was kept to a minimum. I didn’t stabilise or adjust the geometry of any footage, so as not to affect the detail.
Recently someone asked me how I went about taking certain shots, and I thought it would make an interesting article. I was also in the process of writing something similar for my upcoming Fuji Jpeg book, and so, this post is an early excerpt from that guide (it may well change before I’m finished) on how I go about shooting with my X-Pro 2.
This is pretty old news at this point, but as I hadn’t covered it before, I thought I’d touch on it briefly. A while ago VSCO released an updated version of their Film series of Lightroom Presets to support the Fuji X-Pro 2 and XT-2. I finally got around to trying it out, and I’m liking the results.
With most cameras that are released these days having video, it may seem like a pointless exercise to point out the benefits of having the feature. However, if you read the comments on reviews of new cameras (and you probably shouldn’t for your own mental health) there’s always someone who complains about the video functions, saying that they are a photographer and “real photographers” don’t care about video. Even if you don’t like shooting video, I think that there are times when it’s a real benefit to have video in your camera, and the other day I came across a perfect example.
I was walking through a local park here in Dublin the other day, and I loved how the low Autumn sun was creating these lovely patterns of Dappled light on the ground. In the shadows of the trees there were patches of sunshine that danced as the breeze blew the leaves. It was quite beautiful and relaxing, and as I had my trusty X-Pro 2 with me I decided that I would shoot some video as well as stills.
As regular readers will undoubtedly know, I’m somewhat preoccupied (some would say obsessed) with various RAW converters and the differences between them, especially when it comes to Fuji x-Trans support. I’ve found that because of the uniqueness of Fuji’s X-Trans sensor, the results you can get from processing RAW files in different raw converters can vary significantly. I reported last week that Apple has (finally) added X-Pro 2 support to Photos and other software that uses Apple’s system wide Raw engine. I only briefly looked at it then, but in this post I want to examine it in more detail.
I conducted a fun and somewhat interesting experiment the other day I went out shooting with my X-Pro 2. Instead of the usual Fuji glass, I instead used a 50 year old vintage soviet era lens. The lens is the FED Industar 50mm f/2.8 from my old FED 2 camera. The lens gave some interesting results, and it was quite a bit of fun to shoot with.
Last week I posted about some of my recent adventures shooting film, where I talked about shooting some colour negative film with my Canon EOS 5. the other day I was walking past the same spot where I took one of those shots, and as I had my Fuji X-Pro 2 with me, I thought it would be fun to take the same shot again to compare the two.
I was doing some more shooting with the X-Pro 2 over the weekend, and It was a lovely sunny summers day. I spent a bit of time by one of my favourite places in Dublin City, the Grand canal, taking pictures and generally giving the camera a good workout. While I was mostly shooting stills, I did shoot some video with the camera too, and I have some thoughts about the process and the results.
After years of using my trusty little Fuji X-E1, I’ve finally decided to upgrade, and I’m now the proud owner of an X-Pro 2. In the past I have owned an X-Pro 1 but I sold it as I wasn’t happy with the camera at the time. It’s interesting to return to the larger form factor, and it’s also interesting to see how far Fuji has progressed, even since my X-E1. I want do a full review, but I also wanted to document my journey of discovery with the X-Pro 2, so I’ve decided to combine the two into a sort of rolling review, in the form of a diary.
On this blog, I've covered the settings and techniques I use for processing Fuji raw files quite a bit, but I've never really discussed the settings that I use in-camera for use with Jpeg images. While I mostly use the Raw files, I do occasionally use Jpegs straight from the camera. Over the years I've been using my X-E1, I've chopped and changed the setup that I use quite a bit, but here are the settings that I currently use.
Photo Ninja from picture code has added partial support for Fuji’s new X-Pro 2 camera. Currently the application only supports uncompressed raw files, and compressed raw has yet to be supported. You can get Photo Ninja, including a trial version from Picture Code’s website.
The recent Lightroom and Camera raw updates added support for the newly announced, but yet to be released, X-Pro 2. I was curious to see how the raw files looked given the history of Lightroom and X-Trans files, but as the camera isn’t out yet, I can’t exactly rent one. After doing a bit of searching however, I did come across a couple of sites with sample raw files you can download.
After months of rumours and speculation the long awaited X-Pro II from Fujifilm has finally launched, and from the looks of it, it was worth the wait. While the new model looks very similar to the original one, there are lots of changes.
