Street photography ...: Serendipity and the Fuji X100s ...

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: ‘Street photography is like a box of chocolates; you never quite know what you’re gonna get.’

On most my photo walks, I reckon a good day might result in at least ten per cent keepers. (This is an average; sometimes I get a little less — sometimes more.)

On the odd occasion, however, I get one image (in this case, out of 150 frames) which is a little bit special.

Take the picture below entitled ‘Hat Trick.’ The image was one of several taken on a busy (and windy) corner of Princes Street in Edinburgh.

I had absolutely no idea what I had until I opened the image in Aperture and saw the man scrabbling for his hat (crouching next to the girl in the centre of the frame; the hat is on the pavement (sidewalk) left foreground).

Very serendipitous.

These are the first images I’ve taken with my new camera, a Fuji X100s. In an earlier post, I spoke of my experience with its predecessor, the X100. I didn’t like the X100 due to its hit-and-miss focussing and returned it.

The X100s, however, is a completely different unit. Battery life is still limited (I got around 120 shots before the first battery gave out), but isn’t a problem if you carry a couple of spares (good third-party batteries are obtainable cheaply on Amazon).

This isn’t a review, of course, as the attributes of the X100s are much more comprehensively covered elsewhere on the internet. The most winning feature of the camera for me, however, is image quality.

I shoot a lot in black and white, and the X100s produces great film-like images (in jpeg). This is important, as I don’t shoot RAW. I prefer to spend as little time as possible in post-process, and I think this is where Fuji excels.

So, a thumbs-up from me for the X100s (and for the Q-button, which enables effortless switching between colour and black and white modes).

The pictures below are all OOC jpegs with minimal sharpening: