A walk in the park with Fujifilm X100V
In the last 6 months, I had lived like a hermit. Ordered grocery online from WholeFoods, cooked every meal at home, and other than my backyard, I barely stepped out of my house. Since the purchase of my Fujifilm X100V, I have wanted to go out more, not that I would sit down to eat inside a restaurant, but go out to explore places where it's not crowded.
A few days ago, I went to a park for location scouting after lunch. Since I live in Texas, the weather hasn't cooled off enough that it would be comfortable to walk around outside in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was bright, and the landscape looked bleak with that contrast lighting. With a mask on, my walk didn't last more than 15 minutes. During my short walk in the park, I shot some footage with my DJI Osmo Pocket and photographed some nature shots with the X100V.
After a day or two, I finally had time to edit the photos and put together a new video for my YouTube channel. Considered the challenging lighting, the Osmo Pocket did fairly well capturing the scenes. I didn't do custom settings or adjusting the exposure. For my second video on the channel, I decided to try Adobe Premiere Rush instead of iMovie. Rush had more features for me to play with, but it slowed down my iMac considerably, and it made me uncomfortable using it. I haven't tried Adobe Premiere Pro, so I don't know if it would work better or simply need a new computer. In addition to the performance speed, the output video looked choppy if I sped up the footage. I have seen YouTubers talked about editing their videos on their iPads. I am wondering if that would work if I upgrade my iPad Pro. In the end, I went back to using iMovie because it did run smoothly, faster, and the output video looked great even when I sped up my photo editing footage. If you watched the video, you would notice my voice over was shaky, and I stuttered. It was one of the weirdest experiences for me to listen to myself talk with a recording.
In terms of the images from X100V, they looked pretty good in my opinion. The light at the park really stretching the dynamic range of the camera. From my experience editing the RAW files, Fujifilm RAW seems more flexible with the highlight than the shadow. As long as I don't blow out the highlight while I shoot by watching the histogram, I would have a lot more information to work on in the editing room. For the walk in the park, I shot RAW + Jpeg, with an in-camera custom film simulation. Some of them turned out quite nicely and were good enough for me to post them on social media.
It's rather uncommon for me to shoot Jpeg unless you count my iPhone as a camera. Even when I take pictures with my iPhone, I have to edit them using Adobe Lightroom Mobile, or VSCO. It is a refreshing approach to achieve what I want straight out of the camera without processing or editing them afterward. Here are some SOOC examples from Fujifilm X100V. I would say a couple of them are even better than my RAW file edits in Lightroom. If you have any great in-camera film simulation recipes for Fujifilm cameras, please share them in the comment! Thanks!
