First shots with the Fujifilm X100S

Try to get close! That's what I thought when I left home yesterday evening for the last 5 minutes of daylight. I already had a look for possible nearby photo locations to take a few test-shots with this gorgeous camera a few hours earlier but I didn't want to take a shot in bright sunlight, instead I had the plan to wait until sunset to catch this dreamy, creamy and warm light right before the sun disappears behind the French mountains.

I almost forgot to get up and leave home for a couple of minutes but a tweet of a friend reminded me of testing the camera for the first time, the first couple of shots.

So my initial experience? The menu is huge with lots of settings but after owning a Fuji X10 two times before, I felt quite familiar. To start with I've set the imagequality to the highest level as JPG and storing the RAW-Files simultaneously, that I'm able to keep the negatives if I don't like the jpeg processing.

Shooting with a 35mm equivalent is different to my beloved 50mm but you need to decide to either include more of the environment into your shot or walk a step more into your frame for physical cropping using your feet and the ability to walk.

Focus speed is pretty good, I have to check out what metering method I prefer but thanks to the exposure compensation-wheel it wasn't that difficult to react very fast to underexposed metering, as I was facing the camera into the sunlight. I've set the aperture to F2.0 to test out depth of field and out of focus rendering and I'm impressed by these creamy backgrounds. Wonderful!

Using the makro-mode, which I'm quite used to having a Canon G1X with its strange minimal focus distance in standard mode, it's incredibly easy to get extremely close and come on, look at the sharpness. Amazing!

Overall, for the first test I think I've made the right decision to buy this wonderful machine to support my photographic goals with always having a small but powerful camera with me. Looking at the image of the dusty road and the clump of grass only one thing comes to my mind: I think, I'm on the right way!