A pair of events curiously coincided last year: the iPhone 12 was released, and not only was I somewhat drawn to the shiny new slab of technology, but I received some cash from work as a result of having stayed there for way longer than I’d planned.
I’d already realised that over the previous year or two I’d taken very few photos on “proper” cameras: I’d almost exclusively used my iPhone instead. So I sold a number of the cameras that I did own, added my bonus cash, and after some deliberation ordered a 12 Pro Max direct from Apple.
A few days later, a small box arrived, containing something so extravagantly expensive that I didn’t even dare unwrap it for a while—it seemed like something that was never intended for a cheapskate like me. But soon enough it was in my hand, a large slice of finely engineered minimalist design. And off I went to test out its photographic prowess.
I’ll cut a long story short: after about a week I decided to return the phone.
I was disappointed.
Some of the features delievered on their promise: the low light performance eclipsed that of my iPhone SE 2020, the additional ultra-wide and tele lenses were handy to have, the image stabilisation on the main lens was a real benefit, and the huge and contrasty screen made a surprising difference when shooting outdoors.
But in other aspects there were frustrations. ProRaw initially seemed abysmally bad, until I finally figured out that it was only actually accessible if you shoot the original image in 4:3 (I never do), and even then trying to get the actual raw files onto a real filesystem appeared to be impossible. Even once I got it working, while it delivered in terms of dynamic range and low noise, it seemed to have a detrimental effect on sharpness. I was getting significantly crisper shots out of the SE which had cost a third of the Pro Max. Night mode was nice, but then Adobe added a similar feature to Lightroom Camera, which effectively added that capability to my SE. Overall, I just didn’t see much photographic benefit.
What’s more, there were the inevitable issues with using a phone as a camera.
Firstly, the ergonomics are terrible. Phone manufactures are obsessed with slimness, making them difficult to hold. Touchscreens don’t work in the wet or with most gloves. There is no physical shutter button (OK, you can use the volume buttons, but they’re in the wrong place), let alone the ability to half-press to focus.
Then there are the small sensors which have to be papered over with computational photography. And while that has its benefits I don’t much like a number of the ways in which it’s used. Fake shallow depth of field looks fake. HDR images generally look unpleasant to my eye—and HDR processing has a habit of killing light in a scene: if there’s contrast then often I want to exploit it, not flatten it. And then there’s the inevitability of noise reduction and its horrible, smeary effects. I just didn’t like the results I got from the iPhone. They were flat, synthetic, characterless. And I didn’t enjoy the process of getting those results. There was no joy, only convenience and portability.
Phones take amazing ready-glossed Instagram pictures, but getting the feel of traditional photography is somewhat more challenging. And more to the point they’re simply not engaging.
So with the refund from the phone, I had a pool of cash I could use to do something I’d never been able to before.
I bought a pile of secondhand cameras—compacts, because my original intention was to have something to take on bike rides—and tested them all side-by-side. I sold some, bought others. I sold those, bought more. I picked off bargains on eBay, sold them at a modest profit, bought more cameras… you get the idea.
If you include the ones I started out with, it’s quite a list:
The Ricoh GR Digital models I, II and IV; the GX100; the larger-sensored GR and the GXR, the PX. Panasonic: the GF1, G2 and G6; the TZ70; the LX3, LX5 and LX7; an infrared-converted FS7; the FT1 and FT4. Olympus: the XZ-10; the TG-2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Canon: the G9 and the G7X. Fujifilm: the F600EXR. To those you can add a bunch of other cameras I’d previously tried.
And then there was one that piqued my interest in a way that none of the others did.
That was the Fujifilm XF1.
The XF1 is a flawed camera. It has some usability issues (why are half the controls completely unemployed most of the time?), its lens has a headline aperture of f/1.8 but closes down rapidly the moment you start zooming in, that same lens is notoriously prone to the fatal “lens control error” issues, and personally I’ve never liked EXR sensors: their dynamic range is exceptional, but they give a soft and smeary texture which I just don’t like.
But there was enough in that camera to make me curious. For a start, who puts a proper mechanical zoom on a truly pocket-sized camera? Fujifilm, and no-one else. That alone was enough to not only make me interested in Fujifilm, but to make me actually want to use a zoom again—something that no other compact camera had ever achieved, and part of the reason why I’d been using various flavours of Ricoh GR for more than 20 years.
And then there were the JPEGs. The colours were enthralling—not least because of the level of control over them. White balance shift in auto? New to me, but I was drawn to it to help produce steely blue-grey skies and cool, muted colours. More enticing still: separate control over shadows and highlights. Why had no other cameras ever given me this? I like bold shadows, but—in colour images at least—blown highlights tend to look awful. Now I could have my cake and eat it: digital output could be tweaked to my liking without needing to underexpose and then push-process in Lightroom.
All of this was enough to convince me that Fujifilm was different. Wait, not just different… better.
So then I started buying more Fujifilm kit, and selling everything else I’d bought in that experimental phase.
And I’ll go into some of that kit, and what I’ve done with it, in later posts.
Meanwhile, it’s just nice to be using real cameras again.