x100s Early April morning in Sydney

What a beautiful Tuesday morning in Sydney! Clear skies, sun was out and everyone was feeling refreshed from an Easter long weekend. I took the x100s out with me to capture a few quick shots on the way to the office. All shot JPEG, slight tweak in PSE. Enjoy.

View over Kirribilli, Sydney

View from Kirribilli towards Sydney Harbour

The boat moarings at Kirribilli Sydney

View towards east Sydney from Mrs Macquaries Chair

Sculpture reflecting morning light, Mrs Macquaries Chair

x100s walk in the bush and candid portraits

I went for a walk this afternoon and decided to take a bush walk at the back of Lane Cove Sydney. Took the x100s just in case, and I'm glad Im glad I did. Besides taking a few vistas, I decided to play with the internal flash, whist engaging the ND filter and manually setting the shutter speed - aperture set to A. Before the walk I took some nice casual shots of the kids. Remember these are all JPEG files edited in PSE, opening the JPEGs in the RAW editor and doing minor tweaking. Enjoy.

Cooper watching his brother play Mindcraft

Oliver playing Mindcraft

In a Mindcraft trance

Surprise

  

The nature walk

Bottlebrush captured on 1/160 sec, ND, Aperture A, manual focus, internal flash

Another shot 1/160 sec, auto A, ND, internal flash

Another shot 1/160 sec, auto A, ND, internal flash

Broken wood

Broken wood

Check the cropped picture below

Bug on bug! Wow this was shot with ND filter, 1/160 sec, auto A, just lucky timing, they were gone a second later

X100s updated pictures

Well the more I use this camera the better it seems. I'm leaving all the settings to default, except I use Auto ISO set to 1/100 sec and ISO max 6400 as I'm often shooting with a flash. Enjoy the shots. all were shot as JPEG and quickly rendered in PSE.

Looking down at sparkling mineral water

Details from picture below

Full size shot from crop shot above

Oliver PS3

Oliver cake

Grandparent daycare

X100s first thoughts

X100s first thoughts

I was so excited to get my X100s this week, being a huge fan of the X100. Traditionally I'm a Canon DSLR user with a number of great lens. After learning to use the DSLR properly and start generating some very reasonable results, I always wanted something smaller and lighter to carry around. The DLSR, whilst a great camera, does attract a great deal of attention and many people either shy away or ham it up too much for my liking. Maybe I'm too obvious with the DSLR, but then again I'm no professional.

The X100s is unbelievably easy to use coming from the X100, but if you haven't used an "X" series camera before it is not that hard to use, especially with the new "Q" menu and simple menu. The only thing I haven't played with yet are the custom settings, but I'm sure I will once I work out what I want to use them for. The upgrades from the X100 are fabulous and really noticeable.

Best upgrades for me:

• The auto focus is actually really fast. Now I'm not a scientific tester but its as fast as my DSLR or Canon S95. You can choose either a fixed frame to focus on or it will detect the focusing for you. I haven't read the manual yet so I don't pretend to understand the details.
• The low light performance is a great step up from the X100.
• The "Q" menu is really, really handy and very easy to use.
• The "Fn" button is very customisable - I'm still using it for the ND filter, but I'm sure that will change as I learn more about the camera.
• The hood and adaptor still fits - phew, thanks Fuji.
• Same battery as the X100 - phew.
• The EVF is clearer and seems to have solved the lag issue.
• The manual focus works as you would expect it to, very responsive and very easy to use. I like the peaking tool rather than the split screen, but that's just me.

I'd prefer to leave the scientific analysis to the experts, so I'm not going to do any pixel peeping overviews as such. At the end of the day its how the camera performs for you, and for me this camera is about 80% of what I need.

So lets have a look at some shots. These were all shot as JPEG files and tweaked in Snapseed on the iPad. I haven't played with RAW processing yet:

Portrait in Std colur, f8, 1/160 handheld

Cropped from the shot

Luna Park Sydney

Cropped from shot above

Easter Eggs

Panorama of sports field

Sky over Sydney

Sports field in advanced filter mode

I hope this has provided some help. Regards, David