Over the last five years or so, my photography interests have migrated from landscape to street – and, in the process, I’ve had an evolution in the kind of camera gear I enjoy shooting with.
Back in my landscape photography days, I used traditional DSLRs – both Canon and Nikon. I had the great lenses for those cameras and a big backpack with which to schlep all of that gear around. But in January 2013 my interests changed. I participated in a person to person cultural exchange trip to Havana Cuba and came back having fully enjoyed waking the streets and just taking pictures of interesting people in interesting places.
Gradually after that trip my interest in landscape photography faded and my new interest in street photography blossomed. Along the way, I opted to get rid of my big, heavy DSLR cameras and bought into the then relatively new family of “mirrorless” cameras introduced by Fujifilm.
My first Fuji was the XE-2, a great rangefinder style camera. Next was a Fujifilm X100S – an even more classic looking rangefinder design with a fixed lens that’s just perfect for working on the street. It’s small, fast, and beautiful – you look like more like a tourist than a serious photographer making it easy to take even more candid street photographs of people. I subsequently sold the X100S and upgraded to the X100T which had several incremental improvements over my X100S.
A few weeks ago, I upgraded again – to the new Fujifilm X100F – perhaps the ultimate refinement of the rangefinder design by Fujifilm. For street photography, this is just a wonderful camera and the improvements in the F over the T make a great camera even greater!
Here are a few of the first photographs I’ve taken with the X100F on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area:
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