There are some things I’d like to add, but it’s good enough to stick in Docker and run locally as a drop-in replacement for the Cloudflare edition I’ve been using.

The basic workflow of the tool is:

• You make a private (but not secret) album.
• You upload images to it.
• During the upload process you can set the title and caption properties. The caption goes on to be the alt-text.
• Once uploaded, you get a page back with text areas that have basic Markdown and HTML for copying/pasting, like this:

![this is alt text, which will show up for people using screen-readers](https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-g2xggWq/0/20655d2f/X2/i-g2xggWq-X2.jpg)

Why? Because I get better control of the quality of images I share (SmugMug wants them to look nice at a variety of sizes and compresses/resizes accordingly), I’d like to move to having permanent URLs for images in posts (and I think I’m a SmugMug lifer now), and I’d eventually like to save the messy scattering of copies of images made just for sharing then discarded.

Because SmugMug has a pretty nice ecosystem of plugins, uploaders, and apps, there’s more I mean to do. For instance, it’s possible to just shoot an image straight from Lightroom CC on an iPad to SmugMug. There’s also a good desktop Mac uploader that can snarf up things saved to a specific folder. So if I just pick up the habit of adding title and caption metadata in Lightroom, it’ll show up in anything else I do with imgup. Uploading, ultimately, will not be something I do a lot with this tool as I build the parts where I can get back recent uploads and get easy sharing snippets.

Still on the list of things to do with this:

• Make an Atom feed to automate dropping pictures into my socials.
• Make a “Recent Uploads” page that provides pre-made Markdown snippets.
• Make post this buttons for micro.blog, Mastodon, etc.
• Get rid of the manual step of editing a .env file to save tokens. I could just dump that into a file, look for it, and spare the manual uncommenting of code.

In the process of debugging oAuth, I ended up building a manual solution to the problem of keeping an oAuth session alive after restarting the app: Once you do a SmugMug auth with the app, there’s a /tokens page that tells you enough to stick your oAuth access token and secret in an environment variable. In the development environment it pulls this stuff from a .env file. You can use the app without doing this at all, at the cost of having to re-auth the app with SmugMug each time you restart it.

Previously:

• oAuth, rubocop, a Drupal recollection, and the value of play
• Shortcut: upload stuff to Cloudflare Images service

oAuth is sort of a pain. Now that I sort of know how to plumb it in – enough that I’m going to make myself a little repo with a reference application – it has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities.

The whole experience reminded me of when I was doing Drupal development for a job I took to get into tech and out of pure editorial. We needed to do some work migrating a bunch of content between sites. My predecessor, who’d established the site on a previous version of Drupal, had done a similar task with a certain plugin, so working from his notes I installed and learned – that it wasn’t a clickable GUI thing with a wizard anymore – it was now a content migration “framework,” which meant I was going to spend some time learning its API and writing my own PHP plugin to support our particular needs, or … nothing. Ask for money for the outside guys, I guess, because I’d been hired to get better at PHP, not know it. I ended up hobbling through, and I still remember hopping around my office when the damn migration just ran on our 800,000+ user database.

So this weekend I was shopping around for a library to help me get oAuth plumbed in. OmniAuth presented itself right away, and seemed to have a SmugMug “strategy” – their word for “module” or “plugin” – so my eyes lit up. Then reality set in: The strategy was for an older version, and it targeted the old SmugMug API. Okay, fine, I was feeling industrious so what even was a strategy? I looked at a few and my eyes glazed because I had a nodding understanding of how all this worked, but not enough to sit down and implement a plugin for my specific problem.

I think that’s probably okay. I set OmniAuth aside and went with the vanilla Ruby oAuth gem and a reference Sinatra app someone wrote that did a really nice job of creating routes that recreated the oAuth dance. I had found a few other examples, but they were less systematic and harder to peel apart. By the time I was done fiddling with it to get it to work with SmugMug’s particular oAuth endpoints, I felt a lot more confident on how the protocol actually works.

So, do I “know oAuth?” No, I do not. Asked to implement an oAuth signin process from scratch, I could not just implement it. But I do know, more or less, the vocabulary, the steps in the process, and what it’s doing behind the scenes. Using standard libraries is a repeatable task. Good enough.

What else?

I was a little more forward-thinking this time around and picked up dotenv to manage API tokens. I might even be over-using it a little, because it can use the variables you store in it to make other variables. It just makes the core app a little less busy at the expense of having a .env file to consult if something seems to come from nowhere.

I have never been a big linter person, so I decided to give rubocop a shot. I appreciate it as an education tool. There are a lot of things about good Ruby style I never learned, so it was a little alarming at first. Sort of like I’d been made to code in a small room with a large speaker on the wall that was fed by a room full of the most earnest Ruby style pedants monitoring me from a hidden camera.

I ended up turning off a few things it wanted to complain about for … reasons … (like shebangs) but did learn a few things and did find that by paying attention and accepting the corrections I no longer guiltily run a beautifier before every commit because things are at least consistent and tidy. Plus it complains about a few things that are at least potentially problematic.

What else?

Not much. I think I’m feeling voluble because juggling oAuth’s needs with what I wanted to accomplish was a pain in the neck, and SmugMug maintains a separate API for uploading that is harder to interact with than the one I will need to use for the rest of the project. I don’t even really need the uploading API because their own uploaders and tools are great. Cloudflare was simple to figure out, hence alluring, but using my normal stuff (e.g. Lightroom) I can also get titles, keywords, exif data, etc. and do more interesting things without having to build out a database of some kind, or building special UIs to get that stuff. But anyhow, adding then managing the complexity of oAuth feels like an accomplishment. I don’t know how many little ideas I’ve bounced off of because the API I would have needed to touch had moved on from simpler approaches.

And I am feeling good because I realized at some point over the past couple of weeks that I am doing all this because it is playing. I used to do a lot of little utility scripts and silly gadgets because it was fun and absorbing, not because it was hugely practical or efficient. It was just playing. I stopped playing for a long while. It feels good to play again.

It just squirts an image up to the Cloudflare Images API, gets back a URL, and copies some pre-made Markdown to your clipboard suitable for pasting somewhere. Pretty simple to add a step to send it to a Drafts draft, etc.

Cloudflare doesn’t do ProRaw, and I’ve got my phone set to default to that, so the shortcut converts image input into 90% JPEGs (both to make them acceptable as a filetype and to compress them down under the Cloudflare file size limit. Generally I share from Lightroom anyhow, and that shares out however you choose and at whatever quality level.

I like sticking stuff up in Cloudflare Images because I get some dynamic options for presentation, quality, etc. that I don’t get when I’m sending things to micro.blog. Any automation I build against that API can eventually enjoy some reuse for the ideas I have around an image feed. If I need to abandon ship, it’s a simple API I can use to retrieve things.

I’m still plugging away at Smugmug automation, though. Cloudflare is fun to play with, doesn’t cost a ton, and is giving me some practice/learning opportunities. Ideally, though, I’ve had some kind of relationship with Smugmug for a very long time, I trust them, and would prefer to use them as the resting place for “seemed worth sharing” content.

I’m also curious about Adobe’s API.

What I’m ultimately interested in is whichever of these will let me layer in some basic metadata in the form of descriptions, etc. then retrieve it programatically for different re-presentation.

There’s still a whole thing to do on the Smugmug side.

This weekend I saw a few culture-clashes go by around the topic of photography that helped my thoughts gel. One involved a small dog-pile over charges of elitism, and one involved a putative professional talking down to someone who was just happy about their new camera. You could characterize those clashes as people talking down or talking up, but also just talking past each other.

Sometimes I want to write a screed about photography culture and inclusiveness because I’m an outsider in parts of that culture and find parts of it as frustrating and tedious as any other human endeavor that can be gate-kept. Other times I remember, as a younger person who reported to me once said, that I’ve had eight lives, including one as a writer, where I was an insider:

I was (well, am) a published author. For 15 years I successfully provided for myself & family. I was a managing editor, had credits in the industry outside authoring, I’d won awards, and I had success and leadership in multiple formats. I got very good at the parts of the trade that the web added to our job descriptions. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just true and I’m noting it to get through this thought.

At the peak of my career in that field we were coming off the initial shock of blogging (amazingly disruptive to tech publishers) and were beginning to see the self-publishing wave roll in. A lot of my colleagues felt threatened, and that was a fair feeling to have because the people we thought of as “our readers” were experiencing the benefits of disintermediation. Also it just sucks to wake up to Dave Winer and Doc Searls reading a malediction over your still-living body.

We did reader interviews for one of my tech sites, talking to a kind of influencer down below the level of purchasing authority, but positioned to say “this is what I want” and have a credible chance of getting a purchase order approved.

Their universal responses to what we could be doing better:

“Be more like Stack Overflow,” and “you need more bloggers who just do this stuff and don’t care about all the nice formatting and filler.”

Suddenly our field was awash in amateurs. Bad ones, gifted ones, talented ones, terrible ones. And we were dealing with the disorientation of all our tools for determining “usefulness” or “quality” going out the window: Suddenly a terrible amateur could make up for 100-500 words of disjointed prose with five lines of useful configuration code slapped in a pre tag.

As a reader, I was dealing with my own feelings about the self-publishing tide rolling in. As I’d scroll the store with my Kindle I’d see tons of $0.99 books. I was less threatened by that than annoyed: Fiction wasn’t something I was interested in doing professionally, but I had a definite hierarchy of quality in my head, and you had to have some sort of professional editing to get into the higher tiers. I know I said and wrote some uncharitable things about it all.

Then someone flipped the framing around for me, asking why amateur self-publishers are so averse to just paying for a goddamn editor, even just a copy editor.

The question engaged another part of my brain that had been dealing with writers for a while at that point, and still vaguely remembered when I was first starting out, badly damaged by public education and standardized testing, carrying around a deeply held belief I couldn’t write that no amount of positive feedback from my professors was helping:

“I can’t speak for other would-be writers, but as a past would-be writer who spent a lot of time hearing he could write well from assorted authorities, I’d say it’s some degree of ego. Not the nasty, snarly ‘grar, I’m better than you!’ ego, necessarily, but sometimes a more fragile manifestation that editors are in a position to harm without a lot of thought.

Having been put back in touch with my younger self, I remembered that I knew a lot about amateur creators and had a whole set of behaviors and strategies for helping them gain confidence:

“As an editor for online tech sites, I tend to recruit writers on the basis of what they know first, how well they can write next. If I can look at their sample and imagine merely editing it—not engaging it with lash and fire—I’m happy to work with them. I’ve had a few come through who are better than mediocre: They’re adept writers, but they happened to pick another career. Some are recently out of some IT program where they had a good experience with a supportive professor who suggested that they were better at writing than they suspected.

“I’ve learned to treat them the way I wish someone had treated me when I was first being told I was a good writer and had no way of knowing for myself: I understand that their poorly understood talent might seem like some sort of magical manifestation to them. Because they have no way of understanding why they’re good writers for themselves (they didn’t spend school reading good writers or learning about what makes writing good), they depend on outside authority. At the same time, they’re afraid that as easily as one random outside authority conferred the mantle of “good writer,” another could take it away.”

Reminded of empathy I’d stopped experiencing as something other than a management strategy, I came back around to the topic, which was how to deal with this influx of self-publishers of varying degrees of professional conscientiousness and talent:

“I’ve seen a lot of $1.99 and $2.99 genre books come through the Kindle store, and the one thing they remind me of above all other things is that the barrier to saying ‘fuck it … might as well go for it’ is lower than ever. Hopefully it’ll be a remedy for a lot of people who are completely paralyzed by the presence of the Web in their lives, because it’s a non-stop reminder that someone, somewhere is being so fantastically awesome that even trying to be heard or hoping to be appreciated is pointless. A lot of people will still fail, I doubt many of them will ever make a living at it, but a number have a better chance than they ever had before to make a living doing something they love.”

… and that, eleven years later, is where I try to be today.

Unlike my time as a writer and editor, my professional and personal interests have diverged. I like “ops stuff” and “chief of staff” stuff for work, and I am passionate about taking pictures for just walking around being me. I’ve done a couple of commissions and I’ve donated some prints to help out a struggling website, but mostly I just like to make sure there’s a camera with me, I like to share the pictures I take, and I like to revisit them later to see what I can see that’s new.

I share the internet with kinds of photographers who are different from me. They’re trying to make a living, they’re in an active state of honing their craft in a way that is different from how I try to improve.

There are pockets of that culture that both annoy me and remind me of when I was making a living with my writing, because there are similar technology-driven dynamics afoot. I’ve known a few photographers who have lost niche but sustaining businesses, first to prosumer digital cameras, and then to smartphones.

I get annoyed sometimes, because people under pressure or in fear for their livelihoods, while sympathetic characters, sometimes express their angst in really poor ways, either by denigrating hobbyist amateurs and their work, tossing around sexist slurs about the social aspects of popular photography, or simply insisting on speaking to amateurs and hobbyists in professional terms, as if to say there is a single way to talk about photography that must conform to their formalist or commercial concerns.

I also get annoyed because I see myself in them, from when I felt under threat and before someone asked a question that unlocked an answer in me that I’d forgotten I had.

And I feel a dull unease because they (often unintentionally) poke at the part of me who hears things like “you’ve got a good eye,” or “you should try to sell some of this” or “your pictures are just, like, photographic” and feels that jolt of vulnerability, that sense that “as easily as one random outside authority conferred the mantle of ‘good writer,’ another could take it away.”

The annoyance and unease dissipate a little, because I found my way to kindness and can only trust other people will, too. We need more art in the world. We need more people striving to make beautiful things, silly things, pretty things, ugly things, whatever. We need more people striving to create. So we need to be kind.

I’d like a way to lock images in Lightroom or otherwise add a tiny bit of friction to just editing something without considering a few implications.

In Lightroom Classic you have the option to make a published collection with virtual copies. That’s handy, because if you’ve taken a bunch of time to get a collection into a consistent state, the virtual copies help ensure that you can keep it that way.

In Neue LR, the few publishing connections available just use the original unless you manually make a copy. Each collection you make using those connections is another collection whose members you need to be thinking about if you come across an image months or years later and think “didn’t work as a monochrome after all” or “I really like how this looks with the native film simulation,” or even just “wow, I overseasoned that thing.”

Alternately, they could leverage the new versioning system to create and publish a point-in-time version named for and linked to the collection. That sounds more complicated to implement, but it leverages a thing that’s already in the stack.

Locking seems less complicated and could offer a way to get a “hey – edit or copy?” dialog. I don’t think it needs, like, a two-key hardware dongle and a second person to confirm editing. Just a bit of friction.

I recently bought SmugMug’s raw upload feature, so using the SmugMug connector in LrC or LR makes a lot of sense: Every time I make a gallery out of the original raws, I get a passive raw backup of images that are implicitly the ones I care most about.

For now, the real answer for me is to not use Neue Lightroom’s limited connectors. I could figure out some metadata scheme or something to keep from shooting myself in the foot, but it’s easier to just use Lightroom Classic, make virtual copies for each collection, and be at peace.

That’s in keeping with something I want to work on more this year, which is just slowing down a little.

I made a lot of progress last year being more deliberate about a lot of things. I also gave myself a huge gift by spending days of work straightening out my archives and cleaning up some messes I made for myself. I need to take advantage of that gift and double down on that commitment to think through my workflows and behaviors a little more.

To recap, it’s:

• The Pro Neg Standard film simulation
• Dynamic Range set to “200.”
• Highlight tone bumped up a little
• Shadow tone bumped down a little
• Color bumped up a notch
• A stripped down, 8-slot Q menu that covers operational details

For walking around it gives me a fairly neutral view: Colors are “real” but vibrant, shadows are easier to see into. It seems likely I am reacting less to the mood that film simulations and extreme tone settings would introduce. It also keeps me out of the settings and in the viewfinder. Looking back, it makes the X-Pro3’s “distraction-free” conceit a little funny: Don’t give people a 16-option menu to fiddle with and they won’t get distracted, but can still enjoy the quick feedback of a rear LCD and fast access to things they might want to change but don’t have buttons for.

For post, it gives me a mostly neutral image that doesn’t have anything weird going on with the colors. That makes the impact of each Lightroom choice – especially profiles – a little more clear. Shooting at DR200 instead of 100 gives me some leeway with shadow and highlight recovery. It’s possible to stumble into that sort of flat HDR look, but it’s also completely in my hands.

It’s also completely amenable to my very generic “punch this up a little” import preset, which sets a few things to about 75% of where I usually end up. That makes it a little easier to triage and saves me a little twiddling once I’ve got a set to work with.

As someone who can complicate things quite a bit, I’m happy having a setup that is less complicated and less fiddly. There’s no “how’re my settings?” when I grab the camera and go out the door. I just grab it, go shoot, and then enjoy the interprative or reconceptual work in a comfortable chair at home.

Previously:

• Just let me shoot revisited, revisited
• “Just let me shoot,” revisited.
• Fujifilm “Just Let Me Shoot” Configuration

When I walked out of the store I lingered on the sidewalk, reverting to older habits.

These days I have learned to affect an air of indifference as I pre-visualize, camera tucked under an arm and out of sight. Taking the picture is as smooth a motion as I can make it, body on a plane orthogonal to the subject. If I am moving, there’s a brief pause in my gate. If I am still, I start moving. If I perceive people around me, I make sure my eyes are focused somewhere besides that person, or that I am facing away from them just a little, before the camera comes down from my face. As the camera comes down, I grasp the strap and let the camera swing around behind me so that as I pull it forward it’s tucked away again.

I have some rules:

• No street people, unless they notice me and ask. It has happened a few times, but I’ve gotten good enough that they usually don’t.
• No homeless, people sleeping on the street, etc. I let tents into the frame but never the people who live in them.
• Nobody in distress.

These two asked:

… and had their fun.

Those rules are reflective of some ethical concerns about misery porn, and some concern for my own well-being. I’ve been threatened a few times just being seen with a camera on me, and I’ve heard from other photographers who have been attacked. Sometimes the attacks sound like property crimes, other times they sound like people thought they were provoked.

Sometimes I inadvertently break a rule if I’m shooting at night or with a wide lens, or if I hurried a shot before going down the checklist. When that happens I check for a few things – if I can crop the issue out or credibly consider the inadvertent inclusion anonymous.

This is an example of what I consider an allowable mistake:

I am conflicted about a few things.

For instance, it isn’t possible to walk down the 205 bike path or the Springwater Corridor Trail without seeing evidence of human outdoor habitation, either active campsites or the remains of them as they repeat the cycle of encampment and eviction.

I don’t take pictures of active camps for their own sake. Sometimes they get into the background. I don’t take pictures of the people pushing carts up and down the trail. I take shots with people in them when I can anonymize the people and they don’t seem to be in dire straits.

I used to avoid taking pictures of the aftermath of an encampment, but lately I’ve begun to take a few. Those encampments are things that happen. They have consequences. I don’t share many of those pictures because the discussion about homelessness in this city has descended into a curdled, sour stalemate; another front in the culture war. I know who would use those pictures for ammunition.

This is the kind of thing I am talking about:

I am also pretty careful around kids. I don’t have any rules about keeping them out of pictures, but even in relatively “safe” spaces (tourist spots, for instance) I just try to avoid pointing a camera in their direction because it makes lots of parents uneasy. Will you find pictures of kids in my portfolio? Yes, you will. Will you find many? No. And I know 90 percent of them and/or took the picture in a setting where permission is strongly implied.

Anyhow, that was a longer unpacking than I meant to get to the point that I am not a relaxed photographer most places. I do not confuse my legal rights with how other people experience a camera in use around them. When people stop me and ask why I’m taking pictures around them – not of them, just around them – I don’t lead with my rights, I lead with an honest explanation. My experience has always been positive in these cases: People have accepted the explanation. Sometimes they have offered that they’re sensitive because hostile land owners have been harassing them with cameras. I always just say, “oh, yeah. No. I don’t take pictures of people like that and I’m sorry they did that to you.”

Other photographers have scolded me, suggesting this is letting down our side. The only side in this I have is my own, and I behave the way I do out of the best balance I can strike of respect for others’ dignity and desire for relative anonymity in public spaces, ethical considerations, self-preservation, and, yes, my rights.

All of which is going toward how odd and nice it was to be told “take all the pictures you want,” and to even have a normally closed space opened to me so I could explore some more.

And also toward how it felt to step onto the sidewalk and momentarily forget I was out of that protected space. I stood there with my camera half to my eye, trying to judge a shot. Then some motion across the street caught my eye, and I started, and I tucked the camera away, walked half a block as if to scrub away the memory that I had even been there, then quietly walked back to my spot and looked for the shot again.

Up, snap, start moving, camera down, eyes averted.

• Everything that exists as the original raw or jpeg is accounted for. Everything that was missing for whatever reason isn’t in the collection anymore.
• Everything pre-2015 is in its own catalog with its own backup plan to the NAS and cloud.
• Everything post-2014 is in its own catalog and completely in Adobe’s cloud as well as NAS and public cloud-backed.
• A few projects I did for other people are in their own catalogs and in a backup plan.
• There’s an “everything pre-sort” archive up on S3 that’ll just sit there for a while.

I had some worry because Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and Adobe Creative Cloud all have some ideas about what’s in sync and what’s not that are nerve-wracking if you haven’t paid close attention to how everything was sorted to begin with. With this whole exercise over, I seem to know where everything is: If it’s in Lightroom CC, I know the original is at least in Lightroom Classic, even if it’s only available in CC as a Smart Preview.

The hard part was going through seven years of photos and culling, but I ended up getting rid of close to half of that collection by the time I got rid of duplicate jpegs, stuff that didn’t really do anything for me anymore, and things I realized worked well as just three or four photos of a thing instead of 50.

I had to learn one workaround to make sure everything was syncing to Adobe’s cloud:

You can’t just tell Lightroom “put everything in Classic into the cloud.” Everything has to be in a collection that is set to sync. Until that’s done, you have two running numbers: The total number of photos in your collection and the total number synced.

By the time I was done culling I still had close to 2,000 items that weren’t in sync for whatever reason. My first thought was “sync status is metadata, so I’ll just make a filter, find them, and put them in the right collections.”

Nope. Lightroom knows exactly which ones are synced and which aren’t, but you can’t make a filter for it. You have to:

1. Go into your “all synced” collection and select all. (Selections persist even as you change between collections, which matters for step 2:)
2. Go into your “all photos” collection and “invert selection.” That’s everything that was not selected in the “all synced” collection.
3. Drag the result of that inversion into a collection of its own you can either sync, or use as a way to get things sorted into collections that are in sync.

Now that I know how to do it it’s a one-minute operation. Sure is counter-intuitive, though.

The act of dividing catalogs and using Lightroom to find some missing files triggered a bunch of images popping up in the “recent edits” list. This is one I thought I had only as a not great monochrome jpeg, so when it turned up as a raw I didn’t even know existed, I was pretty happy.

It’s my favorite photo from the 6 June Black Lives Matter march in North Portland. I took hundreds that day. On review later, I realized nothing really unified them. They were pictures taken from inside a crowd. There was no theme and no sense of action.

I do remember walking underneath the balcony in the picture, though, because I was feeling sort of deflated.

When I turn out for marches I don’t bring along a sign. The march, to my mind, doesn’t need my distinctive commentary, it just needs my body, in a mass, with other bodies. It isn’t a conversation so much as it is a statement. Not everyone shares my theory of marches, though. There is always a contingent that brings some sort of “see ME” energy along with them. It bums me out a little, especially in a town like Portland where the best intentioned, most earnest voices also demonstrate a knack for ending up being the voice that gets heard and stays heard. The conversation shifts to their particular things: their hangups, their traumas, their particular notion of what is to be done. The focus often fails to shift back to the marginalized person we should all be listening to. We lose focus on who is in the room

I facilitated ally skills workshops at work for a period, and the thing I appreciated so much about the material we used (from Valerie Aurora, formerly of the Ada Initiative) was its suggestion that there’s a sort of humility allies ought to be cultivating. There’s a strong thread of “don’t make it all about you, ally.”

That resonates with me. I was raised in a faith traditiont that stressed humility: “Do justice, love tenderly, walk humbly.”

So I mostly hope those kids thought it was all about them that day.

I accidentally learned how to use Lightroom’s black and white mixer over the weekend. I’ve spent a while at the mercy of monochrome presets and film simulations, many of which offer red/yellow/green/blue/orange filter variants, but I’d still get frustrated with their limitations and didn’t understand them very well. There’s a particular look that I sometimes stumble into when conditions are right, and I like it when I see it, but I’d never really stopped to figure out what was going on.

I collapsed the B&W mixer settings a long time ago and never opened them back up, but in the process of going through some old photos I kept getting frustrated with what I thought I saw and what I was getting, so opened the panel back up, grabbed a slider, and moved it around to see what happened (which is basically “make a selected color’s corresponding monochrome shade get brighter or darker”). It’s funny that it took me this long, because I’ve been using the corresponding color mixer for years to get little pops of color to show up better, or to tone things down when the camera and I didn’t agree on a tone.

Anyhow, this makes pictures that’d be sort of listless as black and whites a lot more vibrant and true when used in combination with the other tone settings (shadow, black, highlight, white). It’s nice to have a little more control in the digital darkroom.

Pros & Cons

I’ve been trying to get my photography workflow into something that is probably trying to balance too many concerns, but:

• I like the versatility of Lightroom Classic. It’s able to publish to a bunch of different places and there’s a robust plugin ecosystem. Cons: Slow, wants to think of the world as files on a platter.

• I like the convenience of Neue Lightroom. It’s nice to be able to do little edits on a tablet and it generally feels more responsive. Cons: Not nearly as versatile as Lightroom Classic.

• I don’t like how all-in on cloud stuff Neue Lightroom is, meaning it is very disconcerting when I go to export a file and get a message telling me that all it has is a Smart Preview and that the image might possibly be in Lightroom Classic. I don’t understand what went wrong that caused the original DNG or raw file to go missing.

I think some of that last point is probably just the effects of over 20 years of digital images I’ve schlepped between no system at all, multiple generations of Apple software, multiple editions of Lightroom, and some other stuff I’ve forgotten about. It was “sorry, Smart Preview only” messages appearing one too many times that got me to think I’d better go deep and solve this now.

So, I shuffled a few raw files through DXO PhotoLab and then Lightroom and put them up side-by-side.

Comparisons

DXO seems to capture more fine detail, and its three contrast controls (micro-contrast, contrast, fine contrast if you have their FilmPack) provide the ability to bring out even more. In fact, maybe there’s an issue with the ratio of control input to image results: A few times I realized things looked superficially good as I was working with them, but once I walked away, did some other stuff, and came back, the images looked … crispy. Easy enough to dial back, but I think it happened at all because …

Lightroom captures slightly less fine detail, and its three contrast controls (contrast, clarity, texture) are able to bring out more, but they feel a little nerfed. The ratio of control input to image results is less extreme than DXO’s. Over the years I’ve come to be okay with making “quick punch” presets that assume a setting of “20” is a safe bet, with space to go to “40” or so before starting to get that weird Clarity Halo.

DXO’s distortion and perspective controls are better than Lightrooms, and the overall medley of fixing distortion and perspective and the crop smartly adapting to each as you tune them is a nice DXO feature.

I appreciate that Adobe understands all of Fujifilm’s film simulations and makes them available as profiles. DXO does not, as near as I can tell, do that. It understands the profile you took a raw image with, but it doesn’t make all the simulations available on the body avaialable in post. Maybe that’s because …

DXO sells a “FilmPack” product that provides its own take on “Digital Films,” including most of the FujiFilm ones (Astia, Velvia, Acros + filter variants, etc. etc.) It’s an additional cost.

So those are the comparisons.

When it came to actually working with the images side by side it was pretty easy to get the ACR-decoded raw into a place that was, well, fine? Fine for my purposes?

I don’t think color rendering was hugely different between the two. I did think DXO’s version of a few Fujifilm simulations was a little overstated, but that’s because their FilmPack product is more explicitly about recreating a film look vs. FujiFilm, which has always felt a little more dialed into the idea of bringing the color qualities of certain filmstock over while keeping a certain level of digital dynamism in the mix. You can do some stuff with in-camera controls to get things into a more “filmy” state, but it takes work and doesn’t come over in the raws anyhow: Only confident jpeg shooters need apply.

Lately I have been going back through stuff I’ve shot and processed and I’ve felt some of it is overbaked. I’ve experimented with dialing back some stuff to see what I think, and often prefer it when the edits are done with a lighter touch. So, DXO’s “recreate the look of these classic vintage films” isn’t playing great with me right now, especially when it’s a $200 premium on top of the cost of FilmLab: Lightroom just makes them available to me in a way that is more inline with how they work for SooC jpegs with reasonably neutral tone and dynamic range settings.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that where the contrast controls are easy to oversteer in DXO FilmLab, the color controls (saturation and vibrance) are a little more in-line with my Lightroom experience. A little goes a long way with both. I seldom venture north of “10” on saturation or “20” on vibrance.

DXO in particular

DXO works as a standalone app or as a Lightroom Classic plugin. It’s pretty easy to shuffle something out of LRC, into DXO, then back into LRC. You can choose to send over all your edits or just the basic raw processing stuff (perspective, distortion, noise control), though at that point they have a less expensive raw converter option.

There’s a lot to like in DXO FilmLab, but with the amount of sharpening and contrast power, I also felt like I was on the hook for a lot more pixel-peeping and scrutiny before commiting, because sometimes the net result felt crispy and overdone. It was much easier to create a sort of digital harshness that I don’t want to manage or be on the lookout for. And the nice thing about all these non-destructive tools is that if I ever do get to a place where I want DXO levels of control, I can buy it then. For now, I’m at a point on the post-production pendulum where I don’t mind a little more softness, less digital ultra-sharpness, and less of a simulated film look.

So …

Probably good to be setting DXO aside for now. It will keep my workflow simpler, and I can go back to focusing on how to best get all the pieces of my Lightroom workflow on the DAM side working a little more predictably.

Over the past month, away from work, I’ve been thinking about that routine. I’ve had more time to play around with cameras, pictures, and tools, and I’ve thought a lot about assorted technical aspects of picture-taking, but I’ve not really done anything to prime my creative pump. Worse, there’s a small part of me I have to own who is properly wondering what he’s supposed to be up to, what he should be expecting for himself, and what he should aspire to. I am so immensely grateful for the circumstances I am in, because I can sit with these things, ride them out, find new reasons to rediscover a kind of optimism I used to have in so much supply. And I have space to deal with the sense some days that I fell through a wormhole ten years ago, had some interesting adventures, and now am out the other side needing to take inventory about what happened to the me who tumbled in.

Thinking back to that morning routine, I remember the feeling I had when I’d see something go by that was just … awesome. After enough times it was sort of like a sunlight therapy lamp: Enough exposure and my sense of personal energy and creative restlessness would go up and I’d want to get out there and do it myself.

With the big Twitter flap and the sudden surge in Mastodon people, I’ve been trying to follow photographers as they turn up so I can build a list. Tonight, though, I also opened up a new Flipboard account because it really is a wonderful way to browse pictures from assorted feeds, and I imagine I can turn my assorted social media photography feeds into a Flipboard magazine.

Anyhow, here’s the post. I appreciate the me who wrote it. He was dealing with some stuff and it was really, really hard to just sit there and be overwhelmed by how much goodness there is out there, but he pulled it together and made himself stare into it.

March 23, 2011

I read a short bit a few weeks ago titled A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life, and it offered some suggestions that resonated with me, along with a few that would not be practical for a good many people. I recommend it, though, because I like the author’s take on ownership of online presence. One thing that came of trying a few of his recommendations was a modification to my morning reading routine.

Over the past year, my iPad has become my morning paper. I like to get up a little early and sit by the fire reading the things I consider interesting but disposable. I use Flipboard and Twitter lists to skim through the things with which I’d like to have headline-level familiarity.

I like the morning skim because I don’t have to place any weight on anything I read there. Sometimes I bookmark useful things for later, but it’s the only time of the day I’ve got that I consider solely mine. After it’s over, my time stops being just mine for long stretches.

One neat thing Flipboard offers is support for Flickr as a “digital magazine.” You can subscribe to your own Flickr stream, those of your friends, your own favorites or (and this is the part I really like) the flickr “interestingness” feed.

Flickr’s always been a little hard for me the same way the rest of the Internet can be a little hard for me. There’s just so much good stuff going on, so many people being completely amazing, and so many things that seem almost casually wonderful that it makes ever doing anything hard. To paraphrase Theoden, who can stand against such reckless awesomeness? Why even get out of bed, because if it hasn’t been done, it’s in the process of being done and probably in the form of a multi-year project with incredible JavaScript transition effects.

That’s harmful thinking on a few levels:

• You never end up doing anything.
• Other people have an easier time telling you your limits.
• After a while, it makes you crabby about everything, because crabbiness blunts the sheer radiance of all the random awesomeness going on, making it easier to live with.

So Flickr’s been hard, because it’s full of great photographers , and the Interestingness feed pulls in a lot of their work.

It occurred to me a few days ago, however, that maybe the thing to do would be to just dive into that pool of greatness, so I modified my morning routine a little by tweaking Flipboard. I pushed a lot of the lists about Facts and Things to the second page, and I filled the front page with interesting photography feeds. First in line is the Flickr Interestingness feed. I’ve been flipping through it each morning and marking a few of the pictures I see as favorites (another nice thing Flipboard lets you do). I’m trying to treat it as a mindless exercise, something done without a lot of reasoning, because I think doing it that way allows me to silence the inner critic for others, which makes it easier to silence the inner critic for me.

I try to stop thinking about the things I used to think about: Is this image overprocessed, did the photographer go too far with the sharpening, is the image correct, is the underlying sentiment hackneyed, and on and on. I try to just like stuff. Sometimes, though, I see a picture that achieves something I once tried and failed to pull off, so I favorite that for when I can circle back later, when I’m in a better frame of mind, and consider the things that will help me take better pictures.

Before going any further, I’ll just say that the most useful, concise, actionable content came from a post by Alex Chen, a designer, and I will be using their approach as a practical day-to-day guide to iterate on.

I also got a little pushback from someone on the idea that an alt tag needs to be done any certain way and was advised to “just write them” same as if I was talking to a friend. If there were no advice anywhere, I would probably take that advice. But there is advice (and worse, there is documentation.) And the things I was missing to feel comfortable “just writing” were a sense of audience expectations and some artistic resistance to getting too descriptive.

I’m grateful to people who shared insights and resources with me. Because I am not some sort of public institution or UX researcher, I leaned on what I could learn for myself rather than tossing up polls or requests for direct input from people who rely on assistive technology to experience the web.

I’d like to make clear up front that I’ve gathered enough information and formed enough of a thought to frame how I think about alt tags and my particular photography as I practice using them, and expect my style will change as I sit with how I’m doing it, and, hopefully, when I get feedback.

I’m also using this post to write down some initial thoughts that I expect will evolve if feedback comes in. I also expect I will be getting some things wrong by at least some peoples’ lights. I hope they’ll have the patience to inform me.

So, why all the uncertainty?

A friend once said that the pictures I post to social networking are more “photographic” than most. I think that comment was about the work I put in to editing before posting. It’s very seldom, even when just grabbing a shot with a phone, that I just share the photo. I’ll probably crop, adjust the exposure and contrast a little, boost or mute the color, etc. even if it’s just a picture of a cup of coffee or some thing I saw on the street. It’s much more common that the photo will go through a Lightroom session, have a profile applied to it, and more.

The “and more” part was where I was getting hung up. Another friend described my photography as “moody.” So from the first friend’s assessment that my pictures were more “photographic,” I graduated in someone else’s estimation to artistically expressive.

Fair point. I am long on the record with believing that filters were the first meaningful Instagram feature. Some were sort of horrible and overdone – kitschy – but others were understated and quietly expressive. I think VSCO improved on the aesthetics, but both apps, I think, gave phone photographers a way to convey a sort of timelessness, gravitas, or pre-nostalgia. They gave everyday photos of people goofing around, lunches, and landscapes a z-axis of expressiveness. They conveyed mood.

I also think a lot about mood when I’m editing. I like using profiles that suggest the colors and contrast of film without being too “vintage.” I like shooting with toy and novelty lenses that allow some vignette or distortion. I pull shadows down harder, blow out highlights, and boost specific colors beyond “what I saw” and into “what I thought could be there.”

Some days I try to rein it in a little, especially when I spot another photographer with a more naturalistic style. Other days I lean in to it.

Yet another friend said to me, at the height of pandemic lockdown, “your pictures remind me that there is something beautiful in everyday things, and that is making this terrible time more bearable.”

I was especially happy to hear that during the lockdown. Like everyone, I was figuring out new things to do that didn’t involve being indoors and around people, and my evening photo walks were a small slice of something that let me take my mind off of what was going on.

It also made me happy because my goal, in the end, is to make something people respond to on some level below “that is very nicely composed and the subject matter is pleasing to me.” I want them to feel something, even if they can’t put their finger on what it is. In fact, the less they can put their finger on it and the more they simply have to feel it, the happier I am.

That made alt tags a little hard to figure out. I want people to take away what they take away. There’s room for people to take away “that is a very nice picture of a city street – the colors are nicely done!” There’s room for people to take away “the perspective mixes up several kinds of architecture, and its shot from an angle that somehow makes the city look tumbledown, as if the skyline is collapsing and buckling.” There’s room to say “there’s a picture of a couple on a tilt-a-whirl, I like the tones – black and white was a good choice!” and there’s room to say “he’d rather not be there.”

I don’t really know anything about art as a display process, meaning I have gone to galleries and museums, and I’ve read artist’s statements, but I’ve never studied what I guess you’d call the theory of art as a display process. Intuitively, and based on what I’ve experienced for myself, I’d say you should receive fewer inputs or interpretation of the work the closer you stand to the actual work. Maybe you read the artist’s statement before you start as a way to help you get a fingernail under everything you’re being shown. Or maybe you save it for after, so as you sit there thinking about everything atomically, some organizing principle can tie it all together and give it some meaning.

As you’re scrolling a small collection of images someone put on a social networking service, that’s “in the gallery and next to the work.” It feels wrong to hang a placard under the image and dissect the image’s assorted evocations. On the other hand, I’d guess our entire conception of how to do art as a display process reflects a period where the reflexive response to “what about people with visual impairments?” would, at best, provoke some questions about “how serious?” and at worse simple dismissal.

Practical Advice

So outside those considerations, here are some useful things I found:

First off, the basics. This post from Fuel Your Photos recapitulated the most common advice everywhere:

1. Write in full sentences including case and punctuation.
2. Keep the text as short as possible (this guide says 15 words, I’ve also seen 150 characters).
3. Don’t include information that is already given in the text surrounding the image.
4. Don’t include “image of,” “photo of,” or “picture of” (a screen reader will already say this).
5. Include keywords, locations, and studio name ONLY when relevant.
6. Try to include additional words and context that are not represented in the page text.
7. Make sure the alt text is unique for each photo on the page.

There is also a common piece of guidance that says “just the facts, no interpretation.”

Going a little deeper, I found the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum guidelines for image descriptions. In addition to several of the common points made above, it touches on describing colors in an image (it’s okay to do so) and also gets into gender and skin tone:

On gender:

“No assumptions should be made about the gender of a person represented. Although, where gender is clearly performed and/or verifiable, it should be described. When unknown, a person should be described using ’they, them’ and ‘person’ and their physicality expressed through the description of their features, which inadvertently tend to indicate masculine or feminine characteristics. The use of masculine and feminine are problematic and should be avoided unless necessary for describing the performance of gender.”

Yet other guidance (lost the link, sorry) went on to say you should never use gender, especially when describing nudes, but did leave open the idea of clothing as a kind of gender performance.

Some of this guidance is a stopper for me and I am not done processing it. To be frank, the reliable guidance about how to discuss gender and sex has moved on from when I was a volunteer ally skills workshop facilitator, and I am not sure how to engage in any public discussion that goes beyond affirming the gender identity people choose.

On skin tone:

“When describing the skin tone of a person use non-ethnic terms such as ’light-skinned’ or ‘dark-skinned’ when clearly visible. Because of its widespread use, we recommend the emoji terms for skin tone as follows: 🏻 Light Skin Tone, 🏼 Medium-Light Skin Tone, 🏽 Medium Skin Tone, 🏾 Medium-Dark Skin Tone, 🏿 Dark Skin Tone. Also, where skin tone is obvious, one can use more specific terms such as black and white, or where known and verified, ethnic identity can be included with the visual information: Asian, African, Latinx/o/a (also see gender), etc.”

This guidance stumbles a little, conflating skin tone (which is as observable and describable as they suggest), and ethnicity (or “race,” if you prefer, and I do not).

For instance: “where skin tone is obvious, one can use more specific terms such as black and white.”

That’s a curious formulation, because “black” and “white” are not skin tones under their own “emoji-based” taxonomy. I am pretty sure they mean “Black” (or, to narrow it down as we embark on this journey through the linguistic thickets of race, “African American”) and “American white.”

So more to the point I think they mean “where you can localize the person in the American racial taxonomy.” They should have just said that or something similar.

There’s much more to read there, and the guide distinguishes between descriptive text and alt text. The alt text is invariably quite simple.

Finally, someone on Mastodon provided me with a very helpful article written by a Product designer & accessibility advocate named Alex Chen who uses an “object-action-context” approach:

“there is a storytelling aspect to writing descriptions. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to go from left to right describe everything in an image because that might lose the central message or create a disorienting feeling. For that reason, I came up with a framework that I recommend called object-action-context.

“The object is the main focus. The action describes what’s happening, usually what the object is doing. The context describes the surrounding environment.

“I recommend this format because it keeps the description objective, concise, and descriptive.

“It should be objective so that people using the description can form their own opinions about what the image means. It should be concise so that it doesn’t take too long for people to absorb all the content, especially if there are multiple images. And it should be descriptive enough that it describes all the essential aspects of the image.”

I found that very helpful, because it’s a systematic way to describe an image journalistically, which is really what I wanted going in. I have other concerns I want to play around with as I try things out and perhaps get feedback, but it’s nice to have a simple guide.

Experimental “grab-n-go” X-Pro3 EDC kit. The whole thing + 3 spare batteries tuck in a Peak Design 5l sling. Yes, my 16-55mm/2.8/WR covers this whole range. No, it is not an okay downtown configuration. It looks like “a big zoom” and that freaks people out. The 27 and X-Pro look like a film thing.

When their next hybrid camera came along I just avoided it. Didn’t care for the aesthetics (more verve than the original hybrid for sure, but not my thing), and the hybrid thing still didn’t make a ton of sense to me.

When Fujifilm announced the Instax mini Evo I hesitated for a second, but found the whole riff on the industrial design of their X-series cameras (which are themselves a riff on a hodgepodge of old film cameras of varying sorts) charming. So I preordered it, thinking maybe handling would make the difference and if it didn’t, well, B&H has a return policy.

I waited a few months for it to arrive, waffling back and forth on whether or not to just cancel the order before it could even ship, but a few things happened along the way. I had a lot of fun with a weird little toy lens on a regular camera, and I realized that with Omicron came a reduction in my wandering radius, which meant photography was feeling a little stale to me again.

Now that it is here and I’ve taken the obligatory first selfie, recreated another recent image, and captured a brass monkey on a shelf, I can say a few things about it right away:

1. Handling really does make a difference. The faux-analog control rings are sort of fun and help you bypass menus. I’d love an exposure compensation knob, which does live in a menu, but maybe next time.

2. The in-camera effects and simulated “lenses” can be used to make interesting images. I’m looking forward to the double exposure mode and see a few other interesting effects I can imagine uses for.

3. It feels a little better in the hand than the earlier hybrid sitting on the shelf. Less blobby and clunky, and it takes up about the same volume as my Fujifilm X100V. It’s still made of plastic, but has a nubbly faux-leather texture and a nice release button. I’m going to pop a few Peak Design anchor points on it and use it with a thin strap for walking around.

4. It does take fine pictures for being super low resolution. There was a boom in small-sensor, hyper-portable cameras in the early aughts. They were shaped like a chunky thumb drive and could hang from a lanyard. This outperforms those by quite a bit, but evokes a similar aesthetic. I’m looking forward to bright days and contrasty shadows, and appreciate that there’s a crop option, so if the relatively wide 28mm lens is hard to fill, you can just tap a few buttons to fix it in-camera.

5. Face detection for autofocus, exposure adjustment, and a macro mode … okay!

6. You can print to it from a phone or Fujifilm camera, which is pretty neat.

7. It has enough onboard storage to hold a bunch of images, and you can add a microSD card for more storage (and easier bulk import into a computer or tablet).

The one genuine annoyance I feel toward it (actually Fujifilm, Inc.) is that you cannot transfer unprinted images to your phone via the accompanying app. It’s not like you can’t get at them other ways, but it adds some resistance to the process that Fujifilm will happily collect ~$0.60 per exposure to remove. I kinda feel like if you’re the sort of person to see the point in an underpowered digital camera printing Instax film, you’re likely to want to fiddle with the image in-app, then round-trip it back out to the camera for a print. Not holding my breath they’ll “fix” this in an update, because some MBA somewhere in the bowels of Fujifilm, Inc. most definitely does not consider this arrangement “broken.”

I also wish the battery were removable. You can charge it up via a micro-USB port, so it’s no big thing to have a pocket charger along on a trip, but it’d be better yet to be able to buy a few replacement batteries and keep them in your pocket. The mini Classic 90 has a replaceable battery. A built-in battery means the camera itself is on a planned obsolescence timer it really did not need to be on.

Al and I had a recent conversation after I brought home a film camera from Blue Moon. I was a little sheepish about it – the camera count is sort of high around here – and she said “you know, what’s the one thing you’ve been doing for years, that you always come back to, and that always brings you joy? I think this is okay.”

This one seems like a pretty fun addition to the collection, so I’m happy to apply that principle.

In 2004, a group of Libertarians realized the dream of the Free Town Project by moving en masse to Grafton, New Hampshire, where they intended to overwhelm the locals and reshape the town according to their Libertarian principles.

The “bear” of the title is more or less New Hampshire’s entire bear population, which found a libertarian paradise amenable for its own reasons: Unregulated living (and waste disposal) coupled with residents who just enjoyed watching the bears and fed them to come around led to an explosion in the local bear population, some attacks, and a covert bear hunt.

The bears are also not really the point, but they serve to help make it. The libertarians are also not entirely the point.

I picked this book up after listening to a few podcasts the author did on his promotional tour, and was expecting to read a narrow narrative along the lines of “Libertarians take over a town, they’re betrayed by their idealism, bears ensue,” but there’s more in here, including a tour of New Hampshire history from the colonial era to present, focusing on both the history of bear and human interactions and New Hampshire’s deeply ingrained hatred of taxes and regulation.

Libertarians maintain a pretty big tent. The earliest ones I knew were debate club nerds who happened to be 2nd Amendment absolutists and enjoyed wearing suits. Over time, I’ve come to know a few other types who range from anarchocommunist to anarchocapitalist, with a blend of cultural characteristics. Some just look like Republicans, some are hippies. The Libertarians I’ve known well are all pretty much fine people. They get intense over financial aid and have more of a propensity for “person with a SNAP card bought cigarettes and a nice steak right in front of me” stories than my other friends, but they’re like most other utopians I know, too. They think society has gotten a bit over-leveraged, and that a lot of state interventions wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t so many state interventions. Pressed for details, most of the ones I’ve known would probably not abolish the EPA or FDA.

The Libertarians in Grafton were not all like the Libertarians I’ve known, and they sort of ruined the town during their experiment. Or at least made it worse. One thing that makes this book thought-provoking and not a simple exercise in Libertarian-punching is that it returns a few times to the fact that Grafton was already a pretty tax-averse place. Between 1940 and 1950, for instance, 20 percent of their homes burned down due to a refusal to fund fire fighters. Over the course of the book we learn that their roads began to fail, they stopped lighting street lights, their police cruiser was more often in the shop than on patrol, and for a portion of the winter roads would go unplowed because the plowing budget had been exhausted.

Hongoltz-Hetling compares all this to the nearby town of Canaan, which enjoyed much better services than Grafton:

“I assumed that, after all those years of resistance, Grafton’s tax rate would be a fraction of Canaan’s, but I learned that the difference is actually quite modest. Because it has managed to maintain larger populations over the decades, Canaan can spend much more on public goods, while keeping tax rates in check. In 2010, the tax rate in Grafton was $4.49 per $1,000 of valuation, as compared to $6.20 in Canaan. That means the owner of a $150,000 home would get an annual municipal tax bill of $673.50 in Grafton, and $930 in Canaan. In other words, Grafton taxpayers have traded away all of the advantages enjoyed by Canaan residents to keep about 70 cents a day in their pockets.”

… which pretty neatly makes the point that the issue was less the amount spent on taxes than the mere existence of taxes at all.

The book also treats its subjects respectfully. You’re left with no doubt that some of these people are dingbats, but there are some genuinely empathetic portraits within, as well.

And, you know, why spend time attacking the people when you can just report the results?

“In a move that seemed strangely reminiscent of Donald Trump’s efforts along the southern border of the United States, the anarcho-communists of Tent City decided to build a big, beautiful barrier to keep the bears at bay. They scrounged some chain-link fencing, pallets, and other scraps of building materials and got to work. Looking past the scarecrow sentries and down the embankment, I could see the fruits of their labor in the woods. The cabins at the heart of Tent City were all joined together by a stockade that could, in theory, block bears from accessing the humans inside. Sections of chain fence were topped by soda cans filled with BBs, designed to rattle loudly if the bears tried to breach the walls in the night. Here, I thought, was another irony, in that those who had come to this patch of woods seeking the ultimate freedom were instead barricading themselves into a rudimentary fortress to attain some level of security that was not being provided by the government.”

Yes, recommended.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling 📚

I read Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories over the summer and it was a useful primer on the confluence of social justice politics and postmodernism. Pluckrose herself describes herself as a liberal (in the classical sense, not the Democrat sense), and was one of the perpetrators of the Sokol Squared hoax/study/“human experiment,” but the book was earnest and seemed fair. It was also dry, a little repetitive, and was more a survey of postmodern thinking than it was a survey of postmodern … practice?

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is more about what I guess you could call “applied postmodernism.” It’s also fair, but to the extent Jeffries considers postmodernism and neoliberalism complementary you end up reading on a few tracks, by Jeffries’ own design. Each chapter is anchored in a trio of anecdotes: Something political, something pop cultural, and something artistic (broadly – photography, written word, and architecture all figure).

The intersection of neoliberalism and postmodernism are the most obviously disturbing to him. The book traces this confluence starting with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and ending with rise of private equity capitalism (the afterword touches on cryptocurrency, which strangely didn’t really turn up much in the first chapter, where examining it as a late reaction to going off the gold standard might have been interesting, but wouldn’t have fit in the chronological structure of the book).

He’s more tolerant of postmodern art across the range of examples he provides, identifying a certain playfulness with warmth. His takes on pop culture – the melding of commerce and art – are a little more despairing, and reflective of a frustration with the dead-end of postmodern “knowing” and ironic detachment.

The portions on art and pop culture were fun to read, if unsurprising. The political portions were edifying to the extent they drew connections between poltiics and postmodernism I hadn’t made.

Recommended if you’re into this sort of thing and would like an accessible but thoughtful survey that connects a lot of pieces.

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries 📚

I went on a brief “use it for everything!” over the past day, trying it out on a little of everything from the past few years. This afternoon I took a step back and realized I want to preserve a record of what I’ve been up to with my edits as much as my subjects, so I’m grateful Lightroom has a versions feature: As I pick things for the collection, I can save a snapshot of my favorite edit up to now, then make a new proof for a collection using Cobalt.

I also sat down with my cameras and got them all into a state of rough similarity with each other on a “walking around” preset. It doesn’t matter so much with a RAW workflow, but by being close to what will come out the other side of a Lightroom session I can pay attention to dynamic range and exposure choices.

Aside from its value as a normalizer, I really like Cobalt’s presets. When I think about how my use of presets has evolved, there’s always been this tension between natural and treated. I think Cobalt understands how much work color alone is doing, and does less to lean into “vintage-y.” It’s the difference between looking through old photo albums, shot with 35mm consumer stock indifferently processed–or the output of a Kodak with a 126 film cartridge processed at the pharmacy–and leafing through mint condition National Geographics from 1972.

When I was working on my own presets (and trying to get something that normalized well across my cameras) I picked one of Adobe’s “Modern” profiles as a base because I didn’t want to make artificial vintage photos – I just knew there was something in the reds and cyans of old film stock I liked, but was not interested in throwing away dynamic range, sharpness, or definition to get it. Starting from something that didn’t throw anything away, then building up the things I wanted to stand out, worked better for me.

Cobalt’s classic film presets preserve the dynamic range my cameras can provide while reproducing the color bias. Fujifilm cameras come super close to what I’m after with the Classic Negative film simulation + the color chrome and blue chrome settings, but miss a little for me because it turns out I was raised on Kodak.

Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been reading Everything, All the Time, Everywhere and it’s a little interesting to be bouncing between a political headspace, where I feel impatient with postmodernism, and an aesthetic headspace, where color scientists are busy selling back the shade “Kodak yellow” and Fujifilm’s included film simulations all lean toward the vintage, all of which suits me.

I like the images I get out of it, but in a qualified sort of way that I’ve felt about iPhone photos for a little while now:

Computational photography is a wonder that can do some amazing things. I have to do a lot less work to get a nice image out of an iPhone in weird lighting conditions than I do with one of my Fujifilm cameras, especially when dynamic range is challenging.

A lot of the apparent magic makes sense when you consider that Apple’s engineers bias for one general display use case (screens) and probably put their thumb on the scales for tablets and phones. If I take one RAW photo with a Fujifilm (or some other “regular”) camera, and one with an iPhone, the iPhone photo will be more immediately useful for mobile sharing.

But I’ve held that iPhone pictures tend to fall apart when you try to work with them much. Fujifilm cameras also do some computational photography: The dynamic range settings on an X-series camera are all about applying variable ISO to different parts of the image to cajole blown highlights and crushed shadows into usefulness. But the effect is less noisy and messy than what you get on an iPhone when you take a closer look. For display on small screens, you know, whatever: By the time Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter are done forcing your images through compression, there’s probably not much difference (though I’ve been surprised when people pick out my Leica/full-crop images from a Facebook album).

But I do notice that iPhone images come out a little “crispier” on the edges from sharpening that doesn’t always work that well, and when the dynamic range is challenging there’s more mush and noise.

I should probably burn the ink and paper to make a few 13x19 enlargements from this batch to see what I get. Maybe I won’t notice any meaningful difference, but some chunk of my photographs are destined to be prints so it’s a real use case for me.

I also think that from a “most people” point of view, I’m not sure how it is that there’s a low- or medium-tier fixed lens camera market anymore. Like, anything south of a Canon PowerShot G-series just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense unless it’s one of those super-zooms. The iPhone seems to be plenty.

That said, I think there’s a level of mobile photography triumphalism that remains misplaced. I like the pictures I got this morning, but not so much that I’ll hand my travel photography over to a phone. My Fujifilm cameras are purpose- made picture taking machines with a vastly deeper amount of control and much more versatile output.

This week, after heavy floods, I went back to the floodplain and the tree was gone. I guess it finally toppled in the flooded ground. I don’t think I ever solved it, but I did love it very much.

“Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

For the past six years or so I have been shooting exclusively with Fujifilm cameras. An X100S got me into the X-series, an X-T2 was my entry point into their interchangeable lens bodies, and I have since had an X100F, X-Pro3, X-T4, and X100V. The X100 series is a wonderful “throw in your bag” camera: A versatile lens, and most of the capabilities of the interchangeable lens cameras in Fujifilm’s lineup. X100s have always been what I’ve reached for on family trips and business travel.

Someone asked me how the Q2 compared to its nearest analog in the Fujifilm lineup: the X100V. I got the question at bedtime over a Google Hangouts chat on my phone, pecked in an answer that I had to edit to fit in the message length limitations, and went to sleep. This is something a little more long form. If you want truly exhaustive reviews of these two cameras, go to Digital Photography Review, where you’ll get much more detail than I know to offer. (Spoiler alert: Both cameras get the “gold” award, and are within two points of each other in overall scores.)

{: style=“display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;” border=“0” width=“100%”}

What you’re getting from me is a comparison of the things I care most about and can meaningfully differentiate, so I can’t tell you much about video–something Fujifilm cares about and which Leica only cursorily addresses in the Q2, which is a stills camera with some video capabilities. The other thing you’re getting from me is a studious avoidance of the more subjective end of the subjectivity range. I can tell you what I like about these cameras in terms of relative inarguability: It is both true that the X100V has a few more dedicated, physical controls and that I prefer that. I do not know if it’s true that Leica optics are “magical,” so I am not going to make any representations about said magic.

If you want to just get to my basic conclusion: The Q2 is a less flexible camera in terms of in-camera control, and I don’t like its handling quite as much as I like the X100V’s, but it produces better images, has a better lens, and its optical stabilization and better dynamic range make it a more flexible camera for my purposes, which involve a lot of night shooting.

I don’t think the Q2 is four times the camera an X100V is, and I can’t think of anyone I’d be in the position of recommending a camera to for whom I’d recommend it as the better choice: Dollar for dollar, the X100V is a much better camera for almost everybody interested in a premium compact camera. At the same time, now that I own the Q2 and have not returned it or sold it in a fit of guilt, I wouldn’t easily part with it: I love shooting with it, love what I get out of it, and expect to keep it for a long time. The only reason it is not my only camera comes down to its fixed, very wide lens, which makes portraits and some outdoor photography a relative challenge.

So, some comparisons:

Physical design

Both are weather resistant, meaning they can withstand some moisture and dust. The Q2 is that way out of the box while the X100V requires you to buy a filter and adapter ring. Living in Portland, I won’t buy a camera that is not weather resistant, and a lens needs to be pretty special before I’ll consider a non-WR one.

{: style=“display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;” border=“0” width=“100%”}

Both feel pretty solid in the hand. The bodies have similar dimensions, but the Q2’s lens is much bigger and surely contributes to its half-pound greater heft.

The X100V wants to look a little more vintage, so its rubbery body covering is textured to look like leather, while the Q2 opts for a crosshatched pattern.

The X100V offers a small handgrip, while the Q2 has a rear indentation for your thumb to ease clamping on to it.

The X100V stores battery and SD card in the same compartment, underneath a little hatch with a rubber seal. The Q2 keeps these separate, and the battery itself has a seal because its “compartment” is open: You slide the battery into its opening similar to a clip on a gun, and release it by pulling a lever and giving the battery a slight upward push to cause it to drop out of the body and into your hand.

The X100V has a built-in flash that works just fine. The Q2 has none: Just a hot shoe.

The X100V has a number of ports including a mic port, a USB-C port that allows for charging via a cable, and a micro HDMI port. The Q2 doesn’t have any ports, at all, so batteries have to be charged with a dedicated charger and photos have to be downloaded either via the WiFi interface or with an SD card reader.

Lenses and sensors

In terms of raw lens and sensor specs:

• The Q2 has a 47mm, full-frame sensor; the X100V has a 26.1MP APS-C sensor.
• The Q2 has an f1.7, 28mm lens; the X100V has an f2, 23mm lens (making it roughly equivalent to a 35mm lens after sensor crop is taken into account). Since I’ve lived most of my (digital photography) life with APS-C sensors, it’s a little easier for me to think of the Q2’s lens as being roughly equivalent to an 18mm lens on one of my Fujifilm bodies.

I won’t go into sensor comparisons. Having not shot with a standard CMOS sensor in a long time, I will say that a few times I’ve run into the kind of moire with the Q2 that I’ve never had to deal with in a Fujifilm camera’s X-Trans sensors. It has been rare. The Q2 produces more subtle output, overall, and I’m always pleased with how much flexibility its DNGs provide: I try not to get too comfortable with that, but I’ve rescued a few images in Lightroom that would have been goners coming from another camera. I’d have said the same thing about the X100V’s RAW files not that long ago, too.

Comparing viewfinders and screens

The X100V’s hybrid electronic/optical viewfinder is one of its standout features. You can toggle between the two, and there’s something pretty cool about the overlay of shooting data on a non-electronic view. That said, I’ve become pretty spoiled by the accurate previews an electronic viewfinder presents, don’t like always wondering about parallax error, and sometimes shoot in monochrome mode as a compositional aid, so I almost never use the OVF. The Q2’s EVF is larger and clearer.

The X100V has a flip-out LCD that’s great for shooting at waist-level. The Q2 has a fixed LCD. I vastly prefer the flexibility of the X100V for street photography, where stealth helps, and for getting down close to subjects.

Both have touch controls, and I seldom use them on either. I never warmed up to the implementation on Fujifilm cameras, finding it a little cranky and preferring to look through the viewfinder to shoot; I simply haven’t experimented on the Q2, outside of using a double-tap center screen to recenter the AF point. I’m glad the emphasis on touch control is still apparently just an accommodation to phone photographers who are used to tapping a screen to focus, etc. and not core to the control experience.

Comparing Lenses

The X100V’s lens is comparable to the “Fujicron” 23mm/f2 on their interchangeable lens cameras, and I’ve come to think of 23mm as my “home” focal length on crop sensors: Great for capturing context on the street, able to do tourist landscapes, wide enough to provide some subject separation. It’s sharp and fast enough most of the time for night-time street shooting.

The Q2’s lens, at 28mm/f1.7, reminds me most of the 16mm/f1.4 on a Fuji body. Not quite as wide, but close enough to be noticeably different from the 23mm on the X100V. It is not, frankly, as comfortable a focal length for me. I’ve taken my 16mm lens on street shoots before, but it’s a hair wide for comfort. I do like taking it on hikes as my sole lens, because the wide aperture allows for some lovely bokeh in closeups of plant life or other details, but it’s plenty wide and sharp to capture a waterfall or landscape.

The Q2’s lens comes with a macro setting. Shot wide open and close up, you get amazing bokeh and detail. The depth of field is shallow enough that a slight breeze can upset the image.

The two lenses live on either side of a divide where portraits are concerned. With a little care, you can overcome the worst of the “hatchet face” effect on the X100V. On the Q2, the distortion of the 28mm lens is a little too much; or I have not figured out how to overcome it yet. It’s great for environmental portraits.

They also live on two sides of a metering divide: The Q2’s wide, 28mm lens can pull in a lot of sky and skew underexposed. The X100V’s (again, cropped) 23mm tends to cause less of that.

This is probably also a good point at which to note that both cameras have an optional digital crop/zoom, allowing them to simulate closer focal lengths: The Q2 allows for digital cropping to 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm. The X100V has 35mm and 50mm crops.

As I understand it, the Q2 is simply cropping, which makes the feature more of a compositional aid; and it works with both the DNGs and JPEGs the camera produces (the JPEGs are truly cropped, the RAWs keep all the data from the sensor but show up in Lightroom pre-cropped and restorable to the full image dimensions). When shooting DNGs, the viewfinder presents crop marks during composition. On review in the camera, it shows the cropmarks. When shooting DNG/JPEG or just JPEG, the viewfinder presents crop marks during composition, but shows the cropped image during review in the camera.

The X100V does a little more, applying some sort of digital upscale to improve over standard digital zooms. The X100V also limits the availability of the feature to JPEG shooting only. The feature isn’t available when capturing RAW/JPEG, either. In terms of UI, the feature works like a digital zoom: Using the EVF, it provides a zoomed image; while using the optical viewfinder it provides crop marks. The zoomed image in the EVF is pretty poor quality (perhaps to maintain the framerate of the display) and can put you off the feature pretty quickly until you see the actual images it produces, which aren’t bad at all, and stand up to all but determined pixel-peeping.

With both cameras, you aren’t getting the actual optical characteristics of the closer focal lengths … it’s still just a cropped image, so you’re not going to magically turn either camera into a portrait machine. Given you have a lot more pixels to work with on the Q2, the 35mm crop is still pretty good, providing a 30MP image – still higher resolution than the X100V at full resolution.

In either case, I’ve got a completely RAW workflow at this point, so the X100V’s digital crop isn’t available to me. On the Q2, it’s a useful compositional aid that I welcome given that the 28mm lens is wide for my tastes.

I suppose this is also the place to note that the Q2’s lens is stabilized (Leica says it’s good for 6 stops), while the X100V’s is not. Given that my primary shooting environment is Portland and most of my shooting is in the late afternoon or evening, the Q2 becomes enormously more flexible: I can easily hand-hold down to 1/8 at night and still get sharp, low-noise images. I wonder if IBIS is the next frontier for the X100 series: Having had it on the X-T4, and given the X100V has a newly redesigned lens, maybe it’s a feature they were holding back this time around, having previously claimed it was impossible on the X-Trans sensors. That doesn’t matter for this comparison: The X100V doesn’t have a stabilized lens so it necessarily produces noisier images at night when handheld.

Control and Handling

Both cameras emphasize physical controls, the X100V a little more full-throatedly. Both have actual aperture rings and shutter dials. The X100V has a dedicated exposure comp dial, while the Q2 has an unmarked dial in the same place that behaves like one by default. I prefer the X100V’s dedicated, marked dial because it’s easier to get it back to “0” without using a screen, which is great for street shooting, where I want to minimize the time I spend with the camera to my face or looking into its screen.

The X100V also has an ISO dial married to the shutter dial. The Q2 “exposure dial” has a button on top that turns it into an ISO dial, so ergonomically it’s close to a wash: I will always prefer a marked control, but this one in particular isn’t one I use much.

The X100V can switch between manual, automatic, and automatic/continuous focus modes with a dedicated switch. The Q2 has a thumb control on the lens barrel to do the same thing for manual and autofocus, but you have to go into a menu to turn on continuous tracking.

For moving the autofocus point around, the X100V has a little joystick nub/button, while the Q2 has a d-pad. One thing I love about the X100V is that you can return the AF point to center by clicking the joystick. On the Q2, the same thing happens with a doubletap in the center of the back LCD, which isn’t as easily done when you’re holding the camera to your face and trying to quickly get your AF point somewhere useful.

Both cameras also offer a lot of flexibility in how their buttons work. The X100V is a little more flexible and has more buttons on the body overall. The Q2 uses long-presses to make some of its buttons multi-function. The “fn” button, for instance, lets you set what option it will control with a longpress, then make that option available from a short-press. The right-wheel button behaves similarly. In both cases, you can customize which options live under each button, providing quick access to 16 functions.

Both also offer a rear LCD menu. Fujifilm calls this the “Q menu” across all its X-series cameras. On the Q2 you get a fixed menu of options that are pretty common sense choices. The X100V offers much more control of its equivalent Q menu: You can adjust the number of available options, and mix and match many, many settings. I prefer it much more, but I’m about to get into a difference in philosophy between these two cameras that renders the difference close to moot.

In terms of saving settings presets, the X100V offers seven slots where you can save film simulation, shadow/highlight tone, saturation, etc. and then name each one. When I had a more JPEG-heavy workflow, I saved several combinations of shadow and highlight tone at various extremes, and a few more neutral variations, then tied switching film simulations to a button I could get at easily. The net result was easy access to seven sets of custom settings times however many film simulations I cared to use. It’s a good system that allows for a lot of experimentation. The missing next step for the system is to allow use of those custom settings when exporting a JPEG in-camera: Today, that operation requires you to hand-select every setting you want to change before preview and save. Even better would be “preset bracketing.” Today you can do film simulation bracketing, which is nice but not all the way there.

The Q2 has user profiles, which do some of the same thing and can also be renamed. Because of the direction Leica has gone with settings overall, these feel less useful as a creative exploration tool and more as a way to specify profiles by shooting conditions and environments (e.g. night, day, indoor, outdoor, etc.)

I tend to prefer Fujifilm’s approach to controls and like the flexibility of the Q menu. I find the Q2’s menu system cleaner and less bewildering/tedious. It is also exposing much less to control.

One other area where I prefer the X100V is in changing settings on the Q menu: You can use the joystick to move to a setting, then use the thumbwheel to cycle through options. On the Q2’s comparable menu, you have to click into the option to change it. It’s a bit slower and less efficient.

Ultimately, the X100V feels more customizable and tunable for individual use cases because it offers a few more buttons and switches you can remap to taste. The Q2 is a bit more opinionated in that regard and has fewer physical controls to remap. While it is pretty flexible, it is still less so than the X100V.

The mobile experience

I should probably note the great tragedy of Fujifilm’s X system, which is its mobile app. For a camera devoted to producing publication-ready images, the Fujifilm mobile app is a catastrophe: Cranky, unreliable, slow. I hate it and won’t use it, preferring instead to carry an SD card reader around for direct import to phone or tablet, and using a dedicated device for remote capture.

Leica’s FOTOS app is far more reliable and simple to use, but downloading full resolution DNGs or JPEGs from a full-frame camera is time- and battery-consuming, and with my workflow they need to go through Lightroom anyhow. Fujifilm should poach whatever team is working on FOTOS: Q2 shooters won’t miss them, and Fujifilm’s CSAT scores will surely triple overnight.

If you absolutely must download images from the X100V instead of using a card reader, there’s an option to reduce the size of the downloaded images to 3MB, which shortens download times and increases your chances of completing a download before the inevitable disconnect.

Some people say they have a lot of luck with the app, by the way. I happen to have found it uniformly bad over three generations of Fujifilm cameras. Even if it were amazingly reliable, it would still be slower than a USB-C SD card reader connected directly to my iPad.

So let’s get to that philosophical stuff:

Comparing philosophies

The two cameras occupy a similar niche, to the extent they are fixed-lens, compact, weather-resistant, “take with you everywhere” devices. While their lenses are a bit different, they’re still just two opinions on the same question, which is how to provide maximum versatility: Just wide enough to capture a sweeping vista, and teetering on the edge (but just missing, IMHO) of being close enough to capture an intimate portrait. The Q2 requires you to be a little more brave in your street photography if you want tighter framing; the X100V will sometimes make you leave a little out of that landscape.

On the inside, though, they diverge more profoundly.

The X100V presents more like an old-school rangefinder on the outside, with maximum physical control, but provides a software feature set that is much more interested in providing more heavily processed images straight out of the camera.

The Q2 presents a more modern, streamlined face, and is much less interested in producing processed images. In fact, its JPEGs are so … just fine … that it effectively directs you toward a RAW workflow.

Let’s start with the two cameras’ approaches to basic image styling:

The fundamental building block of the X100V’s notions around image style is its collection of “film simulations,” most of which are designed to emulate the basic characteristics of Fujifilm’s film stocks: Vivid Velvia, soft Astia, cinema-like Eterna, and moody, monochrome Acros (along with several filter options to go with to effect contrast). There are a few more, including a pair of very neutral options and “Classic Chrome.”

The Q2 is way more staid: It offers “standard,” “vivid,” “natural,” “natural black and white” and “high contrast black and white” settings it refers to as “film styles.” You can affect a few variables within each preset to your taste: contrast, sharpness, and (for the color styles) saturation. Those options travel along with each film style, and it takes a little menu delving to change them.

Fujifilm breaks out those basic options (and more), allowing for a much more flexible approach to in-camera image styling: In addition to saturation and sharpness, you get tone control for shadows and highlights, plus the vintage-y “color chrome” & “chrome blue” settings, grain, clarity (midtone contrast) and more.

Given a little up-front work with an X100V, you can produce very distinctively styled images right in the camera, bending whatever line you care to imagine exists between plain old digital darkroom work and the more tasteful end of VSCO’s filter selection. You can also re-process RAW images in-camera to apply new settings and save a new JPEG to your memory card.

The Q2 offers little of this flexibility: To get the most out of your images, you’re going to be headed to Lightroom or whatever your preferred darkroom tool is.

I don’t think one philosophy is better or worse. Both cameras, at their core, make beautiful images.

Fujifilm is doing some interesting things with its cameras and software across its product line. The XPro-3, for instance, was a pretty polarizing camera thanks to its hidden rear LCD and implicit stance against reviewing your images right after taking them (aka “chimping”). People made all sorts of claims about the value of this approach, choosing to ignore that you can choose not to chimp, can often simply turn off the rear LCD, and can even just flip it closed in a lot of cases. That Fujifilm did this while also making the previously marquee feature hybrid viewfinder less useful and functional compared to previous versions suggested that perhaps the camera was becoming less about perfecting the device and more about perfecting the mood it is meant to evoke.

So, too, does it go with the X100V’s film simulations and the choices Fujifilm is making about which creative settings are going in: The color chrome and chrome blue settings, for instance, are meant to further augment the throwback vibe of the Classic Chrome film simulation.

Taken together, you get the feeling Fujifilm is looking to stake some ground as a lifestyle brand through its industrial design and creative control choices. Years ago, when I sold my X100S to a friend to fund my next camera purchase, his wife, on seeing the camera, dryly noted that “I didn’t know Mike was a hipster.” At the same time, Fujifilm’s cameras, the X100V included, aren’t losing integrity as picture-taking machines. You don’t have to use any of the creative control stuff, and having lots of physical controls can be an aesthetic choice but is also a very practical one: I owned a Sony mirrorless camera for about 18 hours four years ago, and took it back because I simply preferred Fujifilm’s approach to controls and interfaces for utilitarian reasons.

I want to make clear, though, that Fujifilm’s efforts to evoke a particular mood don’t really limit your choices: There is so much flexibility in the interface and the Q menu is so customizable that you can pretty much recreate, for instance, the much less flexible LCD control panel on a Q2 (or any other digital camera). You can leave the vintage effects on the table, never seeing or using them. As much as Fujifilm is making it easy for you to take your photos in a sort of vintage-y direction, it is not making one-note novelty toys.

The Q2 feels less interested in evoking a particular mood, does not provide creative controls that are meant to remind you of vintage film or its visual characteristics, and is content to let the Leica marketing department handle all the heavy lifting of making it less about “retro” and more about participating in a brand’s lineage.

Philosophically, then, the Q2 seems to assume you either want to produce images within a pretty narrow baseline of output, or intend to do your creative processing in post production.

If you’re the type to simply compare feature lists, you sort of have to give the nod to the X100V: It packs more options into the camera itself and provides more in-camera creative tools. For a certain kind of shooter, it is the more efficient choice because for that shooter it might remove the need for all but the most cursory work in post.

Maybe that’s worth a digression, even:

For the past while, we’ve watched the camera industry go into a slump: The low end point-and-shoot market has been eaten alive by capable smartphone cameras, which are offsetting their smaller sensors and lenses with amazing computational photography leveraged by very capable AI-driven processing engines. There are cases where my newish iPhone outperformed my Fujifilm cameras in tricky lighting situations in terms relative to their respective use cases; meaning that the iPhone output looked much better in its target media (phone, tablet, laptop screens) than the Fujifilm output would without significant post production work.

Traditional camera makers are eyeing this trend with some nervousness. A Sony executive, in the process of defending the viability of their interchangeable lens product line, came out and identified the divide as one between “glass” – big lenses and big sensors – and “computational,” or small lenses and sensors augmented with AI-driven image processing.

On the spectrum of premium fixed lens shooting experiences – the latest iPhone, the latest X100-series, and the latest Q-series – the X100V represents a dipping of the toes into solving hardware limitations (Fujifilm has staked turf on the idea that APS-C is enough for just about anybody) with computation. Its digital zoom feature isn’t as passive as the feature has been in past generations, and it offers more tools you’d once expect to handle in post. That has created some experience gaps, too: Turning the clarity setting on involves a 1-2 second delay as the image is processed and saved. The Q2 is still pretty committed to a more traditional workflow: You point your expensive glass and sensor at the subject, release the shutter, and wait to do anything significant in post. There’s an HDR mode, but it’s nowhere as flexible as Fujifilm’s.

If you’re a JPEG shooter, the Fujifilm approach is probably more appealing: Once you lock in a preferred look and save it to one of seven memory slots, your photos can go direct to wherever you prefer to publish without any post-processing and a high degree of individual style. The Q2’s JPEGs are pretty neutral in affect, even after a recent update meant to address complaints about them, and I imagine many people will want to punch them up in post at least a little.

If you’re a RAW shooter, it’s a little more (and less) complicated: Lightroom users (of which I am one) will be aware that not much in-camera customization comes over on import: Fujifilm RAW images can include the film simulation, but few of the other settings. The Q2 is in an even less sophisticated boat: Lightroom imports the RAW and applies little of the in-camera processing at all that I can discern.

The net effect of all this for me, as a RAW shooter, is that I’ve written a few Lightroom presets that I use at import for my Fujifilm and Q2 images alike. Since the Fujifilm film simulations are only available for images from the X100V, those presets tend to use Adobe’s RAW presets, which are fine starting points. I will use in-camera settings as visualization aids, but my Lightroom import presets determine where I start my digital darkroom work.

Conclusion(ish)

I love both these cameras, and would ultimately love some fusion of the two: The Q2’s sensor and lens specs are better and it is the more flexible camera for my use cases as a result, but I do love the X100V’s more generous physical controls and flexible UI: The Q2 is a small but livable step back in that regard. Because I have a very post-production-oriented workflow, most of the X100V’s in-camera creative options are lost on me, as much as I like the aesthetic and have a few personal Lightroom presets that can nudge my images in that direction on import.

I never choose the X100V over the Q2 when I’m headed out the door: the one “advantage” it would have for my purposes is a slightly more comfortable focal length, which the Q2’s crop function effectively removes while still providing more pixels to work with. I sometimes choose my X-T4 because it has the flexibility of interchangeable lenses and excellent image stabilization, or because I am in a particular mood and have a small collection of Lensbaby and novelty lenses that pair well with the camera’s creative options. I’ll probably sell the X100V soon enough, because it doesn’t really have a place in the lineup, but I have a lot of affection for the X100 series and Fujifilm cameras in general; the Q2 is simply a few steps up (but probably not four steps up) from the X100V.

Some links

• A gallery of Q2 images in varying states of edit: I just filtered Lightroom for images I flagged as keepers, so you can see a range of styles and some half-finished ideas.
• A gallery of X100V images in a similar state of curation.
• DPReview’s side-by-side comparison tool, where you can see a number of specs side-by-side. It really drives home how feature-rich the X100V is.

I have been trying to re-cultivate the habit of having a camera with me and looking for opportunities to take pictures, but when I finally got to take a look at the haul from the past three days I could see the slow leak of energy and remembered how I was settling on things to shoot because the few minutes I could scrape together to do that didn’t involve giving myself the time to sink into the shooting groove.

So it was sort of hard to sit there last night with the iPad and swipe through the pictures I did get, taking a stab at making something out of them and realizing there just wasn’t anything there. Ideas I sort of knew were not a great idea were glaringly not great ideas. Fatigue and being hurried meant I hadn’t paid attention to the technical merits, so no amount of cropping or reconsidering could make images I was happy with.

At the same time, I had that recent experience of going back and counting how many pictures I’ve taken since my interest in photography was rekindled several years back–37,000 images give or take in about three years. And then I look at the places where I keep the pictures I like and see a few hundred and consider all their siblings: The almost-but-not-quites, the ones I thought were the good ones that turned out not to be, the bad ideas, the good ideas poorly executed. Then I see the other pattern: The places I go back to over and over, either because something didn’t work the first time but I knew there had to be something in there, or because something finally worked after not working and I wanted to go back and figure out what. Every place has a combination of time and perspective that elevate it. If I were great at taking pictures, maybe I’d be able to see those things without being in the right place at the right time, but as it is I have just taken to following the advice “be the person who goes back.”

Anyhow, 37,000 images, most of which I don’t like at all. Just me trying to figure things out, either as a matter of technical skill, mastering the device that’s taking the picture;or vision, being in the right place at the right time and seeing the right things; or craft, taking something that wasn’t very well thought out and drawing a good image out of it. It’s all just practice.

Sometimes the practice is capturing the right thing at the right time. Sometimes the practice is finding the right thing out of the wrong thing. Sometimes the practice is just making myself sit with the things that can’t ever be the right thing and letting them teach me as much as they can before I set them aside.

Back in my point-and-shoot days, it was with Canon’s followup to one of the Powershot S-series. In my early dSLR days, it was Pentax’s followup to the K10D, and then the Nikon 5000. Back on the point-and-shoot side, it took about a week to decide the Fuji XF10 was largely a dud.

I had some grist for that potential mill: I was bothered by the precious “distraction-free” marketing. I was bothered by the reviews from the gate-keepery “at last, a remedy for those chimpers” people. I honestly didn’t know whether that hidden rear display would prove to feel like an impediment. And, I guess, for as much as I love the compact rangefinder form factor of the Fujifilm X100 series, I wasn’t sure if I’d love it as much on a larger camera with interchangeable lenses.

It was a new camera, though, so I spent a few minutes getting my Peak Design messenger bag into shape as a daily commuter, and I have been carrying the X-Pro3 into work every single day in January. I’ve also made sure to grab it on the way out the door for a lot of neighborhood walks and errands.

The camera has, after a month of regular use and closing in on 1200 exposures, largely disappeared, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Disappearance in practice

With my X-T2, I had already gone down the path of reviewing shots through the electronic viewfinder (EVF). After releasing the shutter, I get a .5 second full-screen preview of the image and that’s enough to make sure a car that may have passed between me and the subject didn’t make it into the frame. Since I don’t review on the rear screen, the idea of it being hidden was already half okay.

On the settings side, which is the other reason people might want easier access to the rear screen, it has been a slightly more gradual adjustment. I didn’t realize how much I tended to fiddle with settings in the field until it took a more conscious action to get at them. The act of experimenting with a new camera, though, sort of pointed the way to a change of habit, anyhow.

Part of taking the camera to work every day included taking a lot of opportunities to take the long way to the Max stop, or getting out at lunch and using the hour to shoot in the neighborhood around work. Because I was trying to get to know how the new features worked and what the new settings meant, I’d usually take a moment to set the camera up before heading out, and I’d largely stick with those settings over the course of a session because I wanted a varied set of images using a new feature.

I also recently decided that I prefer to shoot RAW/JPEG, capturing both a JPEG image that will have all the in-camera settings applied, and a RAW image I can work with more easily in Lightroom later. So some experimentation is just as easily done in post as it is out in the field, especially since Lightroom can apply all of Fujifilm’s film simulations. A dual workflow like that creates a small management challenge, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate it when past me decided to shoot RAW and left me with a digital negative to work with.

Finally, I use all seven preset slots in the camera. Most of my presets center around basic variations on shadow and highlight tone, plus a pair I can go to for either vivid, high-“pop” images, or more muted and even neutral ones that offer more malleable images. Knowing I have a RAW exposure as a fallback makes it easier to do that.

So, abetted by the workflow I’ve landed on and up-front camera configuration, I do think the hidden rear screen has had a subtle shaping effect on my behavior. I go into settings less when out shooting, and when I do I tend to just cycle between my presets through the EVF instead of fiddling with detailed settings.

One area where the camera has not completely disappeared has been moving between modes. I still don’t know where the “drive” button is by touch, so I have to flip open the display and find the drive button to cycle between the single exposure and HDR modes, for instance. That’s not too bad: Drive is the last setting I tend to use or need to change mid-session.

The front-loaded workflow experience

An observation I and others made about some of the new settings in the X-Pro3 (Chrome Blue, clarity, HDR, white balance shifts included in presets) was that Fujifilm has moved a few things people often do in post into the camera. The in-camera clarity and chrome blue settings, in particular, are things I’d typically apply in Lightroom. Now that they’re in-camera, I’ve managed to get rid of a few presets I used to use in post.

That’s had a good effect on the images I “finish,” because Fujifilm’s output is more subtle than I tend to come up with for myself when I’m on the train home and working on an image in mobile Lightroom. The combination of the chrome blue setting with the Classic Chrome film simulation, for instance, gives me a more pleasing, even image than a preset I had been using for years. I still like to experiment in Lightroom, but it has been interesting to go back to images a few days after I’ve shared them and realize that I’m largely toning down changes I made on a small screen, and bringing the image closer to what the camera gave me in the first place.

It has been a little interesting to go through that shift, because I’ve felt very protective of people who are fine with presets in general. Instagram made the practice common, and I still sometimes swipe through the Instagram presets before I post an image, simply to see if much has changed. For a long while, I was also using a range of VSCO’s presets, which are usually a bit more subtle than Instagram’s.

When I read gatekeepers complaining about that kind of thing, I brushed it off: People sneer at “photoshopping” or filters, but I think sometimes that’s because those things result in a garish, distracting image that’s easily spotted as having been worked a little too hard, or made a little too maudlin. But photographers and photo editors have always intervened somewhere between the film and the print. No darkroom is complete without filters and paddles to shape the tones and exposure of the image as the paper sits under the light. Going closer to the moment of capture, there are many, many film stocks that all have effects subtle and profound on the final image, and there are ways to work with those individual film stocks that change their behavior. And at the moment of capture the photographer has weighed in on “reality” with aperture and shutter speed, or choosing where to stand in relationship to the subject, or choosing where the subject lies in the frame. Shooting with a zoom, or zooming with your feet, a human captured in an image can become the emotional center of a story playing out in 1/125 of a second, or they can become a prop offered for scale in a picture of a tourist landmark.

And today, with smartphones making pretty good cameras accessible to more people, some people want to capture images that reflect a consensus view of what is pretty, profound, or beautiful. Other people are simply documenting their lives and trying to communicate something about the meaning of the images they’re capturing. When I see a heavily applied preset meant to suggest a faded Polaroid snapshot, I am more inclined these days to think, “this preset means ’timeless’ and ’nostalgic,’ and that’s what they want me to know about this moment,” than I am to think “this filter crushed the shadows.”

I’m saying all that because while I feel protective of people who use a lot of filters, or sort of clunky HDR tools, or more obvious preset modes, and believe we should simply respect them as artists in their own right, who are making their own choices about their creative output. At the same time, as a matter of efficiency and my own changing taste, I appreciate that the X-Pro3 has been nudging me toward spending less time swiping through filters or playing around with presets. I’ve discovered a few in Lightroom that pair nicely with certain Fujifilm simulations, and I have one preset that simply does the first three things I do to any image. I have a lot of presets and simulations I’ve picked up over the years that I may now remove from Lightroom so that I have less visual clutter when I want to get to my one “punch this up” preset, which I sometimes reconsider and undo after the initial share for small-screen media is past.

Another interesting part of having all that stuff in the camera is the way it creates a sort of augmented reality experience when shooting with the EVF. I put on a pair of AirPods, set them to Transparency mode so I can hear environmental sounds, put on some downtempo, and for the duration of the session I’m half in consensus reality, with its particular tones and shades, and half in the reality of the images I’m making, and their particular slant on what I saw. Those things have turned my sessions into a pretty special time of day that’s just mine: No demands for my attention or emotional energy, and just a few minutes a day where I can operate under a set of rules that demand not much more than simple human decency.

As I type that out, and think about why I started typing—to share my experiences and impressions about a camera—I realize I could be saying this about any camera provided it has done its job and largely faded from my consciousness except as a constrained set of controls to manipulate. The XPro-3 has done that, and it has also made it easier to think less about the images at all—or to make fewer choices about them after capture, anyhow. So while I could be writing all this about any number of cameras I have never used, or cameras I have used and loved in the past, I am definitely writing this about the XPro-3.

When the X-T3 came out, I briefly considered it, but most of the reviews said it didn’t really exceed the X-T2 that much, unless you were in it for video, so I sat that one out, curious about what the X-Pro3, were there one, would look like.

When it did arrive, I felt a little put off by the rear screen, which is hidden except when flipped down. Rather, I was put off by the marketing and noise around the rear screen, which was all about making sure we understood that it was meant to be a “slap in the face” of chimping. The only thing more likely to irritate me than toxic photography shibboleths is probably the phrase “distraction-free,” and that also found its way into a number of reviews.

Fujifilm’s own marketing material is slightly more sedate than reviews from the more dyspeptic gatekeepers of the photography world, but the point was driven home all the same.

Fujifilm’s top-tier cameras have always been a little willfully obscure. No program button: “P” is if you set all the controls to “Auto.” Instead of “looks” or “presets” they offer “film simulations” named after their classic film stock.The controls are for people who miss having knobs (like me … I learned on film cameras with knobs).

The X-Pro3, though—with its hidden rear LCD and knobs and rangefinder form factor—moved out of the territory of “quaint,” “classic,” or “old-school” and closer to the neighborhood of “reactionary.”

I know: None of this is about the camera, it’s about the camera’s marketing. It matters to the story, though, because wow I came close to not wanting anything to do with it by the time I was done reading the reviews.

What changed my mind?

I read a few reviews and learned that it included:

• Curves adjustments
• A “blue chrome” setting
• A clarity setting
• An HDR mode

In other words, it had added features that I spend most of my time doing in post with presets or noodling around in Lightroom. Having had it since just before the holidays, I’ve found myself spending much less time in Lightroom, generally working with straight-from-the-camera JPEGs. The stuff I’ve been getting out of it is perhaps more naturalistic than what I used to come up with when I was depending on Lightroom more, but that’s good. I always felt like Lightroom could be a little overpowering if I got too far into my own head during an edit.

What about the screen?

Eh.

The anti-chimp thing didn’t resonate with me because I actually “chimp” through the EVF when I’m shooting. The X-series has a setting that lets you preview the image you just shot through the electronic viewfinder. It’s not up for long—I have it set to half a second—but it’s usually enough to give me confidence I got what I’m after, that I didn’t inadvertently change a control that ruined the shot, etc. So the only time I tend to be in the rear screen is when I’m changing settings. I’m used to being able to tip the camera down, review/change the settings, and tip the camera back up to start shooting again. That is definitely harder, but it has meant I just look through the viewfinder to change settings (unless I’m on the street, which maximizes the time I appear to be taking a picture/drawing attention to myself).

So, this just feels like an anticlimactic review:

• I like the rangefinder form factor and I get that with this camera.
• I like the new in-camera settings that allow me to do more without using Lightroom or messing with presets.
• It’s nice having USB-C for charging/data.
• The flip-down screen doesn’t really register with me one way or the other. It works the way I like it to work for shooting at waist level or getting down low with a subject.
• I like the new Classic Negative film preset.
• I appreciate the very simple, vintage look of the camera. With a relatively small “Fujicron” lens like the 23mm/f2 or either of the 35s, it’s unobtrusive. I don’t mind walking around with it downtown. I’ve had one bystander say “oh, wow, a FILM camera!”

Oh … one thing I do not like at all:

The clarity setting makes the camera spend about two seconds saving each image. I can’t believe reviewers have missed this, especially since they’re usually rhapsodizing about how they’re finally free to just shoot without thinking about their tool. With clarity turned on, every. shot. takes. two. seconds. to. save. You lose the viewfinder, the camera is locked up, and you’re just waiting. It’s very poor. I hope they fix that soon.

Otherwise, you know …. it’s a good camera. I like it. It’s a little switch from the X-T2, and it feels a lot like my X100F, except chunkier, and with interchangeable lenses, and with weather-proofing. I’ve been taking it out with me every day.

At the same time, I wouldn’t recommend it to many people. Like I said, it’s sort of reactionary and it likes behaving like a throwback. Most of the high-end Fujis are like that, but it’s extra like that. I’d fit it into the matrix thus:

• Learned on manual cameras/rangefinders, miss the feel of that or just like having your controls visible at a glance: X-Pro3
• Learned on SLRs/DSLRs, prefer more manual control, want to be able to easily preview images or look at settings, advanced photographer: X-T3
• Interested in taking nice pictures, want to be able to pick up and shoot or hand the camera to a less advanced photographer, prefer a little more automation: X-T30, X-E3
• Learned on manual/rangefinder cameras, like the rangefinder feel, don’t mind a fixed lens: X100F

Personally, I’d probably consider the X-T30 or X-E3, and actually think those are more appropriate for my skill level, but they’re not weather resistant and that’s sort of important in Portland in the winter. I am willing to sit in the rain to get a good picture, and my camera has to be able to do that with me.

I still hear people skeptically asking “did you have to touch it up in Photoshop?” as if the purity of the image has somehow been diluted. As someone who came up in film, the question never made sense to me. This is what people did before there was Photoshop. https://t.co/Uz7avrBQmk

— Mike Hall (@pdxmph) January 19, 2018

Maybe that was a little disingenuous, because I do understand the question. As someone replied to me, there’s Photoshop and then there’s Photoshop. There’s a picture that starts from a good place and ends up, with some digital darkroom work, in a much better place; and then there are pictures that start from all kinds of places and end up in a really bad place. And some people just don’t like photographs to not be “real,” for a definition of real I would be able to understand, even if I didn’t agree with it.

A coworker and I recently agreed, for instance, that HDR photography seems to go wrong more often than it goes right. And there was recently a thread on Metafilter about flickr’s most popular photos of 2017 where one person said, “they’re all just so processed and sterile and mostly without any kind of narrative to make you care why they were taken,” and another said, “this is some Thomas Kinkade-level kitsch.”

I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to do with your photography.

I’ve read some compelling cases for why photographers should try to get their initial exposure as close to what they’ve pre-visualized as they can. I agree with them, to the extent it will make your darkroom work easier. It’s the same reason I usually shoot with my camera’s RAW+JPEG mode: I get one JPEG using presets (maybe a monochrome film simulation, bumped up sharpness, stronger shadow tones; or a bleached out chrome look with muted shadows and harder highlights) and I get a RAW file. If the JPEG doesn’t work, perhaps because I didn’t check the highlights closely enough or let the shadows get swallowed up, I’ve got a RAW file to work with (and a reference JPEG to help me find my way back to what I was thinking in the moment, since RAWs start from a pretty flattened out place).

But I also like to get a RAW because months later I come back to something I shot in a much different place and see things in it that I didn’t when I shot it. So I’m grateful to have as much information as possible to take the image in a different direction.

I used to feel a little uncertain about that. I had no issue sharpening, dodging, burning, adjusting contrast or exposure. I did tend to stop at the edge of something of what I guess you’d call “mood.” I suppose I felt like a picture is a moment, and that a moment had a mood, so it felt dishonest. I was never averse to tuning pictures, or curating a collection to include the ones saying what I wanted to say, but I always tried to keep them anchored in the moment. Especially pictures of people. I’m not sure when that changed, but I’m positive Instagram, VSCO, Camera+ and other camera apps that provided a lot of filters probably helped with that.

I was a little resistant to the “get that vintage look!” thing when it started. Like, granting a picture taken yesterday the characteristics of an artifact created 25 years ago felt unearned. But the more I scrolled through my Instagram feed or poked around Flickr—and the more I just opened myself up to how those pictures made me feel instead of wondering what I thought about them—the more I began to appreciate them. Were some of the filters kind of crummy and over the top? Yeah. Definitely. I way prefer later apps that came along. VSCO, for instance, has done a nicer and more refined job than Instagram. But despite the occasional garishness, it occurred to me that these tools were allowing people to play with mood and tone, opening up a kind of expression that hadn’t previously been available to people who weren’t seriously invested in the craft of photography.

So I came down on a side, I guess. I’m more willing to play around with mood and tone. I’m more okay with revisiting a picture and seeing if there are other stories it could tell or feelings it could evoke and then seeing if I can get them to come out. I especially love playing around with things I take with my Lensbabys because they’re already not at all what I saw before I put camera to eye. Some days I like to just put on the headphones and hunker down in front of Lightroom, looking for images that could suit the music I’m listening to, then working to blend their tone with the music. For instance, I spent a lovely evening working on coast and skyline photos to this album:

And that, in the end, is what I was trying to get at with that tweet. Photographs have never really been “pure” in the sense that they’ve been subject to post-exposure manipulation for about as long as they’ve been around. And I’ve never been too fussed about doing that with a computer instead of an enlarger, a dodging paddle, and a handful of color filters. I believe that a photographer trying to imbue an image with a particular mood or emotive truth is no different from a poet or painter trying to do the same thing in their own medium. I’m okay with that happening at the moment of capture, or beyond.

The film simulations are one of my favorite parts of shooting with my Fujifilm cameras, and I love the way the highlight and shadow tone settings can dramatically affect the mood of a photo without needing to do much in Lightroom.

The one frustration I’ve had has been that it’s hard to reconstruct the JPEG output of the X-T2 or X100F when working in Lightroom: You can set the film simulation for a RAW image, but the shadow and highlight tone settings don’t really have direct analogs. You also have to manually set the film simulation. It doesn’t show up in the import. Instead, you get the usual flat, sorta lifeless RAW output to begin with. I’ve found two things to help with that:

• Exploring Exposure has a free Fujifilm presets download that includes shadow and highlight tone bumps. If nothing else, it's a point from which you can start exploring.

• Lightroom Solutions has X-LR, which applies the film simulation you were using when you shot an image to the image in Lightroom automatically. It's a good way to bulk change your images at the top of your workflow.

Learning How the Settings Work

You can always experiment with the different simulations and settings, but that means fiddling around in the field and relying on a tiny display to preview the effect your settings have.

Fujifilm’s RAW Studio software makes it possible to experiment on a big screen by processing images on a hard drive using a tethered X-T2 or X100F: You can load a RAW from the hard drive, tweak the settings you have access to in the camera, then save a JPEG using the camera’s processor. It’s not that different from using the camera’s own built-in JPEG conversion functions (press the “Q” button while viewing an image), but you have the benefit of being able to do it on a large screen to get a better sense of how film simulation, sharpness, noise reduction, and highlight/shadow tone work with each other.

Prior to buying an X-T2, I usually had a general-purpose zoom of some kind (18-200mm) plus a prime or two (35 or 50mm) .

My couple of years with a Fujifilm X100S got me back in a prime lens mood, and most days when I’m picking something to walk around with, I’ll go with a prime. I have a single zoom, and when I’m carrying a bag with a few lenses in it, it’s usually one of them.

When I bought my X-T2, I started collecting lenses in earnest. I think I might sell a few of these now that I understand them all better, so there’s some overlap in the collection.

I’m not going to talk a lot about the technical characteristics of these lenses. To my eyes, they’re all pretty sharp and nice. Whether they’re weather resistant matters to me because I live in Portland, and then it’s down to how well my brain works with a given focal length. As a somewhat shy shooter, I don’t start feeling comfortable with walking around lenses until 35mm or so.

If I had to name a favorite out of the bunch … a desert island lens, I guess … I’d probably go with the 35mm/f2. It’s sharp, weather resistant, small, and versatile. I’ve used it for street, portraits, and landscapes. It’s not as hard to fill as the wider lenses, and the only thing I’ve got that’s tighter is the 56mm portrait lens, which isn’t versatile and isn’t weather resistant.

I guess I’ll do this wide to close.

Rokinon 12mm/f2

I love this lens. It produces really sharp images and it’s fairly small and light. It’s a manual focus lens. On the X-T2 I use focus peaking, which outlines the in-focus parts of the image in red.

My one hangup about this lens is that it’s not weather resistant, so it doesn’t come outdoors much during the winter or in rainy weather.

Fujifilm 16mm/f1.4 WR

Kind of love-hate with this lens. It’s very fast and sharp, but it sits in a weird spot for me. Since it’s weather resistant I’ve carried it around more readily in the winter than the Rokinon, but it’s awfully close to my 18-135 zoom, or 23mm/f2, which are also weather resistant.

A quick search tells me I’ve put about 900 shots through it, and I can see where I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s so close to the Rokinon on one side, and so close to the 18-135mm zoom on the other that I’m not sure what to do with it. I’ve got a few landscape ideas I’d like to try out, but I get the feeling I’m going to sell it.

Fujifilm 23mm/f2 WR

As a 35mm full-frame equivalent, I suppose this is the classic street photography focal length. I like that it’s small, light, unobtrusive, and weather resistant. I struggle a little with filling the frame with it because I’m not fond of getting up on subjects. On the other hand, the 24MP sensor on the X-T2 means I’ve got plenty of room to crop.

This is the same focal length as the lense on the X100 series. Curiously, I’m pretty happy with 23mm on those cameras because it’s versatile: Landscapes, environmental portraits, general purpose street stuff, etc. But when I’m shooting with an X100 I’m in a different frame of mind, too: It’s a small camera for snapshots. I’m in a pretty informal frame of mind when I’m shooting with it. When I have the X-T2 along, I’m thinking differently and I’m probably carrying a bag with a few other lenses along.

Fujifilm 35mm/f2 WR

Next up from the 23mm, another small, weather resistant lens at the classic 50mm (“nifty fifty”) full-frame equivalent focal length. I think this is my favorite walking around lens. It does a little bit of everything, and I love just carrying it around.

Fujifilm 56mm/f1.2

Hm. I bought this for portraits, and I’ve used it for portraits. I haven’t taken many portraits. It’s fast and sharp. I’ve read people who use it for street photography, but it’s a pretty big lens and I’m averse to taking things onto the street that will read as “fancy and big, it must be serious” vs. “little camera that isn’t serious.”

Anyhow, I’m glad I’ve got it even if it doesn’t see a ton of use. It’s a niche lens for a niche purpose. Once I get around to shooting more people, it’ll see more use.

Fujifilm 18-135mm/f3.5-56 WR OIS

My sole zoom. I usually have it along when I’m carrying more than one lens, and I like to have it for travel in situations where I don’t care to swap lenses around. Since it’s weather resistant, I don’t mind taking it all sorts of places.

Since it’s image stabilized, it’s good for indoor shooting despite being relatively slow.

The image stabilization is pretty nice. This was shot at pretty high ISO (6400) and very low shutter speed (1/20):

Not tack sharp, but pretty usable. When I think back to ISO 1600 on my old Pentax K100d, which had in-body stabilization, I’m pretty happy with the results.

I thought 135mm would feel like a compromise, because I had a 200mm zoom for my Nikon D5000. So far, though, I’ve been pretty happy. I haven’t felt limited or frustrated, and when I review what I shot with the 200mm zoom on my Nikon, fewer than a fifth of my shots ever exceeded 135mm. The majority were shot somewhere between 50mm and 135mm.

I had a 50-200mm zoom for my Pentax K100D, and a lot more of my shots were taken at 200mm, but that includes a wedding where I used the long focal length to keep way out of the reception and shoot from the edges. That was the first time I’d ever shot a lot of people, and I was very uncomfortable with the experience. Since then, I’ve loosened up a little: If I’ve been invited to take people pictures, I don’t hang back as much. I also tend to give the subjects a little more room in the frame for a more environmental portrait sort of effect.

Oh, the Lensbabys: Sweet 35, Sweet 50, Edge 50

I bought a Lensbaby Optical Composer plus some lens elements for it. It’s pretty fun to shoot with now and then. They’re all manual, and Lensbaby is a weird shooting experience in general, and it’s not weather resistant, so I don’t play with it much anymore. At the same time, it’s a fun creative toy so I’m keeping it around.