I have been giving Commafeed a try as my self-hosted RSS service. It’s got a very simple presentation, decent keyboard shortcuts, presents the Fever API to RSS clients like Reeder, and has filtering capabilities (though I am having some challenges understanding their ins and outs).

The main issue I have with it is its somewhat limited set of sharing options, but that actually helped me decide to decommission Wallabag (which is not one of them). I’ve found that pretty slow and not as easy to deal with as Pocket across platforms. I wanted to like it, but it’s hard to justify for a kind of tool I’m glad to have but don’t feel a deep attachment to. So I’m switching back to Pocket, and Commafeed works just fine with that.

Stories for Tiddlywiki

The Stories plugin for Tiddlywiki lets you create a second column and divert tiddlers to it so you can have things side-by-side. I don’t use it much for my personal wiki, but for my work wiki it’s a great way to have my interstitial journal sitting open and ready in one column, and my active tiddler open in another.

This appears to be the closest to a link I can find.

Fujifilm X100VI

I am not made of stone. I preordered one. I took my X100V to San Francisco a few months ago for a work trip and renewed my affection for the series. As with Portland, I much prefer the X100s to a larger ILC for street carry. I did keep thinking, as we walked around Chinatown at night, “man, I wish this thing had IBIS.” I still liked the shots I got, but you’re managing harder tradeoffs. With any luck I didn’t preorder too late to get one before next September, but we’ll see.

I’ve long held that the X100 series could stop iterating once it had weather resistance (solved with the V) and IBIS (solved now with the VI). I suspect a faster lens would make the bulk unacceptable, so I will not hold my breath on that one. I’d like the series to match up batteries with the X-T series, too, but that might be another bulk issue, and I have accrued a collection of the WP-126S batteries between the X100F and X100V, so I’m set. I have a very thin Wasabi charger that’s great for travel. During my SF trip I had all-day walking around juice on the battery in the body and a pair of spares at the bottom of my sling.

I wonder if the X-Pro series ended with the X-Pro3. I liked mine a lot but also felt like the “anti-chimping” display was a little gimmicky, and it didn’t have IBIS. Returning to a normal rear panel of some kind and IBIS would be great, but I’m good with the X-T5 and not so hung up on the rangefinder-esque design that I’d run out and buy an X-Pro4. And if I did, I’d slap my nice 23mm on it and have … an X100 but a little bigger and more conspicuous and a few stops faster. Nope. I think the X100VI has the makings of a desert island camera.

Work

Today was IT steering committee day. I was asked if I thought my crew does more or less than traditional IT. Interesting question. My current place sells SaaS, my last place had a lot of on-prem estate (and a hyper-overbuilt network given the size and nature of the business).

At my last place I presided over the last of a desultory teasing apart of corporate IT and something we called “SRE” for a period before settling on “developer services.” For reasons I will avoid enumerating, we had some struggles with that teasing apart that persisted over four years – I left engineering, did IT, went back to engineering, then went back to IT one more time. Each time I’d chip at the problem from my new perch. It all came down to loosening some death grips in IT, reassuring corporate security that the engineers wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree, and eventually just being a little bit of a prick with the one remaining IT person who felt it right and proper to require security engineering to petition for log dumps so they could audit their own services.

“If you make him give them self-serve access to Splunk, he’ll quit,” warned the manager I had over that team.

“Well, good. He needs to be this tall to ride. If he can’t handle letting people see logs for their own services, this is probably for the best.”

I wrote a memo (the only “Mike uses his directorial ex-cathedra voice” memo I’ve ever written) explaining that everyone needed to be this tall to ride. He couldn’t handle it and quit. Wasn’t tall enough to ride.

Anyhow, I have a lot less complexity to deal with at the current place. There are still some weird “why does this route through IT” issues that pop up, but they’re pretty easily resolved by visiting my security colleagues and asking “did we do this for a reason” (seldom) and then asking engineering “would you like to remove me as an external dependency?” (usually, but sometimes I wonder if they think I’m trying to trick them).

What it amounts to is an interesting inversion of value. When I presented today about the year’s big initiatives it was mostly about portfolio governance, access management, and providing administrative uplift to the vendor management process. We still have to deal with traditional IT admin stuff, but it’s pretty contained. Not nearly as sprawling and perilous as it was at the last place.

Anyhow, “traditional for where” is the real answer. I’m glad to be doing my job in a context and era where the parts that are simple and the parts that are complex have sort of shifted around.

The other half of the “get more mobile with Denote and Emacs” conundrum — outside the stuff where you can read notes — is the capture part: Being able to get things into the system when you’re out and about and maybe don’t have a laptop along.

The glue for everything I’m doing to address the mobile stuff is Syncthing, with all the nodes connected via TailScale. On my iOS devices, I use Mobius Sync as my Syncthing client. Since I’ve got Syncthing running on a Synology, that provides me with a central node to compensate for mobile or seldom-used desktop devices coming in and out on the TailScale network as they sleep and wake up.

To make my Denote setup more mobile, I’ve got SyncThing updating my published notes folder more frequently than the default, and I’ve got a save hook for my Denote directory that both publishes my Denote notes as HTML and runs the note indexer script that FusionJS depends on to make search fast. Since org publishing is incremental, there’s not a big hit when I save a Denote file: It recreates the notes index and runs the Python script, which takes about a twentieth of a second to complete at this point because all it cares about is the filename and the tags (which are built into the filename.)

Over time, as my notes scale, that script might take longer, and that’s fine: It is also running on the Synology where performance isn’t as big of a deal. Running the indexer on the client nodes just means when SyncThing kicks in it is shipping an updated index along with the new files to the Synology.

Anyhow, that’s the background infra stuff.

To handle the other part, capture, I turned to Drafts. It needed a little bit of Javascript to create a few variables for the output template, and it can write out to on-device storage, so it was trivial to create a Drafts action that takes this:

Some note about agriculture
fruits vegetables
I am going to write today about fruits and vegetables and how important they are to our way of life.

… and turns it into a file called 20230612T121326--some-note-about-agriculture__fruits_vegetables.org with the content

#+title:      Some note about agriculture
#+date:       [2023-06-12 Mon 12:13]
#+filetags:   :fruits:vegetables:
#+identifier: 20230612T121326

I am going to write today about fruits and vegetables and how important they are to our way of life.

… and then deposits it into the on-device storage path for Mobius Sync and ingestion into the Syncthing network.

The use case for something like this is pretty small: I’d like to be able to make Denote notes on a phone or iPad when I’m not near a laptop or desktop machine, and it was easier to automate that up front even if Denote’s naming and formatting convention is pretty simple. Following the “convention over configuration” mindset of Denote, the top level of my notes hierarchy is empty, so it becomes the de facto inbox for when I’m back in front of a “real computer” for triaging incoming notes captured while mobile – moving them into the right folders, updating metadata, etc.

The action writes to a Drafts “bookmark,” so you can use whatever storage back end you like: If you keep your Denote notes in Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or whatever, the action will prompt you the first time you use it (on Mac or iOS/iPadOS) and you can choose the right thing for you. I suppose for Git people something like Working Copy will probably also work.

Anyhow, seems to be a fine v1.

And I guess, going wide for a few seconds, another comment on what I like about Denote generally: It’s a good convention! As I was working on the search stuff over lunch, I realized that the Python script that creates the index.json file that Fuse.js has to consume was using file creation times to record the date of a given note in the index. That’d be fine if those notes were never regenerated, but they are. But whatever! The Denote naming convention embeds the date in the filename. So I just parse that to create the date entry for each file in the index.

If all my plaintext notes were saved with that naming convention for all eternity, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. If the space goat comes and eats Emacs, the convention-over-configuration approach means that if you understand regular expressions and any commodity scripting language, you can pipe your stuff through pandoc and be on your way in a new tool. It’s not much more complex a lift than, say, switching from Jekyll to Hugo. If you’re willing to use a tool you have to use lisp to configure, this isn’t a big thing.

The one “looking over my shoulder” question I have is around markup and future-proofing. There’s a case to be made for using Denote with its Markdown-and-YAML format and not its org-mode format. That would provide close to perfect portability into something like Obsidian without needing to run anything through pandoc first. There’s an argument to be made that parsing that format is easier, too, because YAML is a thing and “org mode file variables” are kind of not.

Eh. Whatevs.

I might need to write a script. Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.

A bit more on the Leica Q3 and the Fujifilm roadmap

I loaned my Leica Q2 out, which prompted some comments from the lendee, which made me think about the Q3 in clearer terms. It sounds like actual general availability will be quite delayed, and I’m in no hurry to buy new gear anyhow, but I think I’m more curious about what’s next for Fujifilm’s X100 lineup and the eventual X100 – VI? 6? Whatever it is.

I’d love to see IBIS and I’d love for it to have the X-T5’s sensor. It feels like a faster lens is probably too much to hope for: The size difference between Fujifilm’s two faster 23mm lenses — the original XF23/1.4 and the WR remake — and the lenses you find in the X100 series and the XF23/2 WR is pretty drastic. I think an f1.8 or 1.4 would bulk the X100 up considerably.

I’m also curious about whether there’s any life left in the X-Pro series. I thought the “no chimping” design of the X-Pro 3 was a gimmick, and I am not sure what the real audience even is for an optical viewfinder. I read someone recently who put the X-Pro OVF in the context of early mirrorless technology, pointing out that it helped people get around the performance problems with early EVFs. Personally, I feel an aesthetic connection with it but prefer to just shoot with the EVF. The one exception to that is when I’m out with my little Funleader fixed-focus pancake: I use the EVF now and then to spot-check exposure, but it’s fun shooting super lo-fi with a toy lens and an OVF.

It feels to me like the X100 line could be coming close to rounding out a phase: Get IBIS squeezed in there, break the f2 barrier on the lens, and what else do you do besides iterate on the sensor as it makes sense to do so, selling it as a travel/street compact all-rounder? They added WR last go-round. There’s not much left to do if it is to stay a fixed-lens kinda-rangefinder. If they killed the OVF to make room for IBIS, and bulked it up a little for a faster lense, I think I’d take that deal. It’d just be an APS-C Leica Q-series at that point.

Fright Night (2011)

We watched the 2011 Fright Night remake last night after a weekend conversation about vampire movies. I wouldn’t call it a paragon of the form, but by the time we were able to settle down for a movie it was a little late and we wanted something fizzy. I … didn’t remember Colin Farrell having so much fun the first time I saw it, which must have been in the theater or not long after its run. But he does have fun. And it left us wanting to go back to the ‘85 original, because the remake raised a few questions we couldn’t answer. It was nice of them to let Chris Sarandon turn up long enough to get eaten.

That conversation also has me wanting to do a few more pairs/trios. Like, Murnau’s Nosferatu along with Shadow of the Vampire, but also Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to get a good dose of German Expressionism.

Old man coos at cloud

Possibly lost in the Denote shuffle because I’m using them and they seem to just work:

Syncthing, NextDNS, and TailScale are really doing it for me.

There’s the occasional glitch with Syncthing, but nothing too bad and probably because I have some things writing to the sync folders a little too often. But it works really well for how I’m using it:

• Syncing org files
• Syncing the HTML output of org publishing to the Synology
• Syncing back end for Mackup (configuration syncing)
• Syncing back end for my Doom Emacs configuration
• Syncing ~/bin

I haven’t been using it quite long enough to rule on whether it’s as good as Dropbox, but it’s not nearly as needy as Dropbox, and it works great over …

TailScale. I came this close to setting up a VPN on my Synology when I remembered that I meant to look into TailScale. I went in expecting I’d bounce off something about it, and didn’t expect to be able to connect iOS/iPadOS devices to it, but it’s almost magical in its just-works-ness. I’ve got a few things on Heroku I could probably pull back to the Synology at this point.

Another bonus is that I can use my NextDNS account with it, which spares me conflicting profiles on my Apple devices and hence removes the need to keep separate ad blockers going on anything: I’m subscribed to a few filters on NextDNS and it is more than adequate.

I need to take one last pass at making sure I don’t have something syncing its config on Dropbox, and get all my Dropbox stuff out, but I think that’s one more account I can kill thanks to Syncthing and TailScale.

I’m remembering back to when my world was NFS mounts and DynDNS, and this is all so much better.

DPReview’s initial review of the Leica Q3 says:

• Tilt screen
• Actual ports (USB-C, micro-HDMI)
• Bigger sensor
• Some rearranged buttons
• Option for wireless charging
• Hybrid AF
• $5995

They stuck with the previous 28mm lens and are standing by digital crop if you want to get to tighter focal lengths. I’d still prefer a native 35mm, but you’d lose a little “take anywhere” versatility.

Anyhow:

The tilt screen is very welcome, and will make the lens’s macro mode more useful/practical.

The rearranged buttons caught my eye, because the Q2’s arrangement felt pretty unergonomic, and it was easy to accidentally press them with your face when shooting in portrait orientation. DPReview says it helps:

In addition to the new tilting touch panel, the buttons for ‘Menu’ and ‘Play’ and a custom function button have been moved, now appearing on the right to join the four-way controller. Having used both cameras, within a few hours of shooting the new one I found the layout to be a marked improvement that let me reach all the buttons with just my right thumb while the left hand stayed on the lens ready for the next shot. It’s a much faster and less cumbersome arrangement that let me get in and out of menus quicker.

Having a USB-C port is welcome. The wireless charging part sounds like a nice-to-have that makes it a little nicer to just keep near the door.

All in all, sounds like a nice step forward for the Q series, and with the tilt screen it sort of does become the $5995 Fujifilm X100V you always wished would happen, with its 35mm digital crop still outresolving the X100V by a few megapixels.

Speaking of the X100V, I did compare it with the Q2 a few years ago:

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.

One thing that changed a lot for me since writing that up was the arrival of IBIS in the Fujifilm ILC lineup. It wasn’t something I weighted as heavily then, but definitely started weighting more heavily as I learned how much it expanded my horizons. With the changes showing up in the Q3, I’ll just say that the gap between the X100 series and the Q series has narrowed. There’s still 4,200 actual dollars of daylight between the two to account for, but the Q3 is a more flexible camera than its predecessor.

So:

• A bit shy of 2x the resolution, uncropped sensor
• Faster, more versatile lens
• Image stabilization

I’m not sure how to go about doing a parts list that would account for the differences and leave me with some objective calculation of the brand tax you’re paying, but it’s easy to imagine an X100 Pro series because we have that in the form of an X-Pro3 with the 23mm/f2 Fujicron, and MSRP on that rig is around $2,300. So, following this reasoning, we’ve got about $3,300 to account for. You’re still a stop shy on the lens and don’t have a macro mode, you’re still trading away depth of field and resolution thanks to the sensor difference, you still don’t have image stabilization.

Okay … so maybe we stick the newer Fujiflm XF23mm/f1.4WR on our theoretical X100 Pro. That’s $500 over the 23/f2. We’re down to $2,800 difference. We’re still contending with the sensor difference and IBIS. Tough to call.

On IBIS, the Fujifilm X-T4 was an incremental change over the X-T3, and it came in at $200 more MSRP, with IBIS being one of the larger differentiators. The X-T5 introduced a much larger (but still APS-C) sensor, but kept the MSRP. So … we’re down to $2,600 difference, and still have to account for the sensor, which sort of throws the math on the lens, too. I’m not sure how to square that. Call it $500.

So, we’ve found about $1,300 in component differences (IBIS, lens, sensor)? Leaving us with around $3000 to account for.

I am assuming the red dot involves pigments mixed from the blood of unicorns.

I kid.

Silos and Denote

Last night I was finishing up some note cleanup in Denote and realized that a lot of the stuff I’d atomized from my job search was sort of interesting and useful, but not in a day-to-day way. And that I wanted to have some way to segregate, eventually, “work” from “personal.”

Denote has a siloing feature that lets you keep separate directories of Denote notes that can’t see each other. If you operate in one of those directories, all your Denote activities (creating a new note, etc.) treat that directory as home. Outside the context of any particular directory, your default Denote directory is home. There are a few other features related to suggested keywords in those silos, but for now it’s enough to be able to make broad distinctions.

There’s also a useful function for pre-selecting a silo then running a Denote command targeted at it, so you can be out and about elsewhere in the filesystem and dispatch information to different silos as needed.

For now I’m siloing by default/personal and “career,” which is what I am calling all the interview notes, work-oriented biographical stuff and generic management writing I’ve had to do. I’ll probably put my job search log, interview notes, and other stuff that’s currently all in a monolith into that directory as well, for long-term storage. And eventually there will be a “work” silo for day-to-day work stuff.

I vacillated about the segregation of big-picture career-related writing from day-to-day work writing, but realized most of that career stuff is a prompt. Interesting to read through, and good grist for first-30-day planning and thinking, but not pertinent to the day-to-day. If I end up feeling like some part of it is, I’ll just pull it into a metanote as a link.

I guess the other Denote thing of, er, note, was that Prot’s whole “this is also a good way to just learn Emacs” direction with Denote got a workout tonight. I watched his demo video, where he marked a selection of files by regexp in dired, then made the unmarked ones disappear from view in the directory. It took three or four scrub-throughs to catch which commands he was using to make that happen, because he was just doing it the way you do when something is deep in your muscle memory. But eventually I caught it all – %m to mark by regexp, t to invert the selection, then k to “kill” the lines (but not kill kill them, just hide them). It sounds like a lot, but most of my Doom menus are two or three keystrokes deep. Once I had it, it was a lot easier to narrow and triage my collection and get everything dispatched into a silo.

Update on that …

One thing I didn’t like so much about that “just use the native commands” approach was that in Doom, you’ve got to switch in and out of evil mode to use all of dired’s keystrokes. I ended up grabbing dired-narrow, which dynamically narrows a dired buffer, and then recorded a quick macro to restore the buffer view (using the native dired command, which would need a shift out of evil mode):

(defun mph/dired-unnarrow ()
  (interactive)
  (evil-emacs-state)
  (execute-kbd-macro (kbd "g C-z")))

Then I added dired-narrow and my new macro to my Denote menu structure:

(map! :leader
      :nv "n d" nil ;; Doom has deft here, so we have to nil it out first
      (:prefix-map ("n" . "notes")
      (:prefix ("d" . "Denote")
         :desc "ripgrep" "/" #'mph/denote-rg-search
         :desc "Backlinks" "b" #'denote-link-backlinks
         :desc "Move subtree" "c" #'mph/denote-org-copy-subtree
         :desc "add keywords" "k" #'denote-keywords-add
         :desc "remove keywords" "K" #'denote-keywords-remove
         :desc "Move subtree" "m" #'mph/denote-org-move-subtree
         :desc "New note" "d" #'denote
         :desc "Rename with frontmatter" "r" #'denote-rename-file-using-front-matter
         :desc "Pick silo, then command" "s" #'mph/denote-pick-silo-then-command
         :desc "Narrow dired view" "n" #'dired-narrow
         :desc "Unnarrow dired view" "u" #'mph/dired-unnarrow
         )))

Technically I guess those narrow/unnarrow commands belong in some other hierarchy, but I will tend to use them when I’m doing stuff with Denote, and they can live in more than one context if I wish.

I have the sense there are other things I could be using, like Embark, but I am still struggling with the whole Vertico ecosystem, so one thing at a time.

Update to the update

With Vertico/Embark on Doom, I don’t need dired narrow to get what I was after:

• SPC . to start finding files
• Once things are narrowed, C-c ; moves all the candidates into their own buffer
• Do stuff
• q to quit the transient buffer

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.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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.

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.