Sushicam

Click here for todays photos

Todays photo don’t really have any cohesive theme to them, rather they are just a small set of images I happen to like, and I hope you feel the same.

I’ve started to recently think about doing some drastic downsizing of my camera gear.  I’ve accumulated quite a bit of it over the years, and as time goes by I find myself shooting with a smaller and smaller set of gear.  For the photos I posted topday, the cameras used were: Sigma DP2, Leica M9, and Nikon D700.

A camera that has recently become my default carry-with-me-everywhere-I-go camera is the Fuji X100.  It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty darn close for what I like to shoot.

Probably the two biggest gripes I have with it are the parallax error when using the optical viewfinder and the placement of the exposure compensation dial.  The placement of the exposure compensation dial is a problem because it is too easy to accidentally turn it when holding the camera or taking it out of a bag, resulting in unintentionally over or under exposed shots.  Although I have started to fall into the habit of checking the position of the dial, so this is turning into just a minor nuisance instead of a show stopper.

The bigger problem by far is the parallax error as it results in a rather high percentage of mis-focused images at closer distances when using the center focus point while using the optical viewfinder.  It really is a shame too since otherwise the optical viewfinder is a pure joy to use.  It seems to me that Fuji could rather easily fix his problem in firmware by biassing the focus point down and to the right as you focus closer.  I guess I could also try using the multi-point focus mode, but I’d rather not trust the camera to guess what the subject of my images are.  As a side note, I was really excited about the manual focus capability of the X100, but Fuji really dropped the ball in this department as it is glacially slow, and down right unusable.

If I want to shoot manual focus glass on something other than the M9, the Sony NEX-5 fits the bill nicely since its focus peaking feature is so simple and intuitive to use.  And seeing as I have not even touched the M9 in the past couple of month, it very well may be the first of my cameras that gets put up on the auction block.  It is a superb image making tool, and a real joy to use, but as I was shooting with it I found myself gravitating to shooting with just a 35mm lens.  Weighing the M9 cost and image quality against the Fuji X100, I think I may have to let the M9 go and use the generated funds to take the X100 on a trip or two to Europe.  :)