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#471. Paris Workshop Day 2. La Défense, posh pooches and le tragique camera accident!
By pascaljappy | News
By pascaljappy | News
On ne change pas une équipe qui gagne. That’s French for “don’t mess with something that ain’t broke”. So, since yesterday was such a hoot and the weather promised to hold, we followed the same plan of an early start …
… coffee at our local joint …
… metro to our destination …
… and shoot to our heart’s content.
Our first stop was La Defense, the business district just East of central Paris and full of interesting buildings and people. We arrived 30 minutes before sunrise, watched the workers arrive and roamed the large area in small groups for a couple of hours …
We left via the metro, heading out again into the Tuileries gardens …
… then into the heart of Quartier Latin.
Back at the hotel to rest before our evening jaunt, we once again commented upon the day’s production and did some interesting comparisons between rival optical clans. Philippe and Joakim took the exact same photograph with a Sony A7r2 + OTUS 55 and a Leica Monochrom + Summilux 1.4/50. We examined the results side by side and found some minor differences that I’ll get into in another post. Both systems are astonishingly good. And the Leica offers the benefit of a nicer shutter click, solid-feeling build and compacity.
But the real shock for me was grabbing Paul’s Fuji X100-T in Jardin des Tuileries. That thing is amazing. I’m getting one asap. It’s like wearing an invisibility cloak. It is so silent and intuitive that you can walk up to people totally unnoticed and grab super quality files on the fly. My heart had always desired a small camera and the RX-1 seemed the ideal companion but failed to convince me in the flesh. The Leica Q did just the opposite but is quite large and pricey. This Fuji, by far the cheapest of the three, is the Goldilocks deal for me and the most fun to use. Very highly recommended.
Well, nuff about me. Here are some of the photos the my partners in crime were kind enough to share. Brilliant stuff …
Joakim
Paul
(Paul also share a documentary shot of a personal tragedy unfolding … 😉 )
Philippe
Steve
The fun continues tomorrow (in a slightly different format …). Be seeing you 🙂
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“….and le tragique camera accident!” Quel accident? Cosa é successo? Who’s suffering? El suspenso es demasiado!
Philippe’s camera got greedy and devoured his cream cake with such intensity that the viewfinder now sees the world very pink 😉
Ooops – having accidents here too – you might get that query twice.
Sorry to hear it Philippe – I’m hoping you can do so well that you can sort out how anyone should choose between the Sony and the Fuji stable – when I finally see a clear path ahead, I would like to upgrade my compact, but like so many others out there, all I get is conflicting signals. In the meantime I’m “self-educating”, upgrading my knowledge base in other ways, so that I can get the best possible results from the gear I already have.
Trying to fathom the choices of pixels is proving impossible – I can’t even find a definitive description of what a pixel is, or – more particularly – what shape they are. Some suggest round dots, some say square, and one even suggested they don’t have a shape, they’re just “points” – whatever that was supposed to mean.
It’s beginning to remind me of the man who was describing (in all seriousness) how we will be able to have inter-stellar space travel. He’d picked up the idea of using machines that deconstruct matter and transmit the information to a receiver at the destination, which recreates the matter from the data it receives. And hey presto, you can instantaneously disappear from this planet and reappear in that same instant on a far away star in another galaxy. He disappeared from the radio station before I had a chance to ask him how he proposed to instal the “receiver” on the other star, since it was apparently 30 million light years away – and obviously, it would have to BE there before anyone could possible be “transmitted” to it.
I think I’ll just concentrate on improving my photography and let the manufacturers worry about the equipment.
Pete,
pixels are almost always squares (in some cases rectangles, but that is very rare). But that’s not really important to determine what camera to chose.
There are some big differences between the Sony and Fuji systems. In their use, the Fujis **feel**more like Leica rangefinders while the Sony more like traditional DSLRs. The Fuji system brings to the table a lovely viewfinder system that lets you view the scene optically than switches to digital when you shoot. Brilliant. Colours, out of camera are bewildering. Probably not neutral but very yummy. The Sonys (our versions, at least) provide a larger sensor (which allows shallower depth of field) and more pixels (which has a slight impact on image aesthetics and a huge impact on disk drive space). Both are really good systems. If you’re upgrading from a compact and don’t require many lenses, the fixed-lens Fuji XT100 is an absolute cracker. Image quality is superb and the camera feels immediate, reassuring and intuitive. Plus, having just one lens is a tremendous help to make real progress as a photographer.
Never change a winning team is a saying that actually exists in English as well. Great fotos btw.