An afternoon at 23mm

Into the light was a regular feature of my afternoon

Finding myself needing to be in Leeds on Saturday with a few hours to play with I decided to grab a shoulder bag for an impromptu urban shoot. My Fuji x100t was in there, I really do take it everywhere, and I popped the Fuji X-T1 in for good measure with a couple of polarisers and an ND graduated filter.

Harsh light, strong contrasts and processing to match

I wandered through the city centre with the x100t in my hand and as always thoroughly enjoyed shooting with this little camera. It’s fixed 23mm f2 lens has a character all of its own and as it equates to a full-frame equivalent of 35mm it is perfect for my style of street photography. I’m fast beginning to realise that if I had to give up all my toys apart from one then I would probably chose to keep this camera. It was a bright, sunny afternoon with barely a cloud in the sky. Very harsh light with very strong contrasts. The camera coped with it all and I found the EVF very handy in judging what degree of exposure compensation to apply.

Heavy shadows called for some heavy duty processing in Snapseed

Because of the light I decided to work with black and white in mind. I would usually set a black and white preset but for reasons that are still unknown to me I chose not to today. The images were processed on my phone whilst I was out and on my return home and also processed a few on the iPad. In both instances however I only used Snapseed for the processing. The other stylistic choice for the first part of my afternoon was to work in the square format. I usually shoot in 3:2 and crop later but today I went for the 1:1 option so the screen was showing me the square crop and the resulting JPEGs were also square. I know the RAW files will be 3:2 which might be useful later but for now I’m working with the original JPEG files.

I did get eye-balled a couple of times but kept smiling and kept moving

Since I closed my Facebook account I have posted a few images to Instagram and have also posted to this blog far more often too. When I sat and processed these images I deliberately chose a “grungier” look and feel to these images largely with Instagram in mind. The strong, contrasting light was also a big factor in this decision.

Easy Rider

Leaving the city centre behind I headed to Clarence Dock where I swapped over to the Fuji X-T1 and it was only then that I realised it was sporting the 23mm f2 lens. It was the day of the 23mm lenses obviously. I will share the images from Clarence Dock and the waterfront in my next post.