SOUNDIMAGEPLUS: Beautiful light with Fuji X100s

I often write about the weather here in the UK, and as we are fond of saying, we do get an awful lot of it. Saturday was a case in point. A dark sullen day with lots of rain cleared up in the late afternoon to produce some gorgeous light. I drove down to Stratford-upon-Avon to capture some of this.

But being the UK it still managed to bite back. The church and rainbow shot was taken one-handed as I was using the other one to hold my umbrella as it was pouring with rain where I was. The whole period of sunshine only lasted about 1/2 hour, but was worth every second.

How commercial these shots will be remains to be seen, since clear blue skies and bright midday light always sells better than dramatic dark clouds and shafts of sunlight. It should be the other way round but it isn't. But then imagine people booking holidays who aren't photographers, what kind of weather would they like to see?

For these pictures I used my Fuji X100s and the Wide-angle and telephoto adapters. And currently that's one of the cameras that will survive what is a substantial clear out. I've finally got round to doing it and my Sony A7 and some lenses are already sold. The point is I have too much gear sitting on my shelf. Some of it has hardly been used. I bought a Fuji 14mm a few months ago and I think I've used it twice. It's a great lens, but it seems pointless to have it sitting around just looking decorative. At the moment the only other camera I know will survive the 'cull' is my Sony A7r. I'm undecided about the rest and I'll be slowly chipping away at what I have, getting rid of the gear I use the least first.

I do of course want to keep it all and selling stuff in today's second hand market, which isn't what it was, means I will loose some money. However, that's preferable to having money tied up in gear I like the look of but always seem to leave behind when I go out. The X100s is just my favourite ever camera. It just looks so good and handles so well and is pretty much my 'personal' camera. The A7r is simply the best image quality I've ever experienced so that's not going anywhere. Apart from that everything is under consideration.

It's still my intention to do what I've wanted to do for years and buy the complete set of Voigtlander manual focus (D)SLR lenses. I'm thinking I might use these as my 'core' lenses, since with adapters I can pretty much use them on anything. I'll still be keen to try new things, so it might be the case that I keep the X100s, A7r and the Voigtlanders and just have the latest whatever to use, write about and play with. But as ever this is down to my whims and caprices.

Plus of course as I'm always keen to point out, cameras and lenses come and go, but it's the pictures that are the really important thing. And my pleasure at what I got on Saturday will last a lot longer than any pleasure I get from my temporary cameras and lenses.

N.B. to see more on the cameras and lenses featured in this post click on the relevant labels (tags and keywords) at the bottom of this post.
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Monday, 9 June 2014

Beautiful light with Fuji X100s - Seling lots of gear.