Paris street photography - traveling X-Photographer style

Every time before I pack my travel photo bag, I try to envision what kind of photos I expect to take on location for the job or portfolio work. In my early days of photography I was prepared for every possible photo situation by bringing most of my gear. I recall one time where I lugged 20 kg (40 lb) of DSLR gear in a backpack through Paris. That was an awful experience!

Since my switch to Fuji X cameras 3.5 years ago, thankfully my travel photo bag has become a lot lighter. The night before this trip to Paris I decided on the following gear to bring:

- Fuji X100S

- WCL-X100 (wide conversion lens) for the X100S

- Fuji X-Pro 1

- Samyang 8mm f2.8 fisheye lens

- Fuji XF 14mm f2.8

That's 2 camera bodies plus 4 fast prime wide angle focal length weighing around 1.6kg (3.5 lb)!!! Add spare batteries and ND filters and you're still well below 2 kg (4lb) in your bag. That is only 10% of the weight of the gear that I took along a few years ago!

My Paris streeet photography gear

Everything plus my iPad Air and battery chargers fit comfortably into my ThinkTank Retrospective 10 bag. With the small bag and photo gear there have been no hassles at airport security for me any more. A great way to start my trip quite relaxing despite the early red eye flight.

For my style of street photography I prefer wide angle lenses. I want to be close to the scene while still providing enough space around my subject to explain the situation to the viewer. In terms of 35mm film equivalent field of view I covered 12mm (8mm fisheye),  21mm (XF 14mm), 28mm (WCL-X100) and 35mm (23mm on X100S).

I stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport with my X-Pro 1 + XF 14mm and X100S ready for action and right there was already my first frame to be captured. Always be ready is important in street photography!

The lone traveler - Fuji X-Pro 1

For a street photographer to start the day with a portfolio keeper is equivalent to an athlete who manages to get a great result in his first attempt. Unposed street photography is like a box of chocol... I guess you already heard that analogy too many times ;)

Off to downtown for breakfast and more street photography:

La Cigale Paris - Fuji X-Pro 1

Bulldog roaming the city - Fuji X-Pro 1

Comparing the Fuji X-Pro 1 autofocus to the improved AF on the X100S, the X-Pro 1 AF feels a bit long in the tooth now. While you can still get good results - especially when following some of

my AF tips from a previous post

- I really wish for a X100S or X-T1 style performance boost on Fujifilm's top of the line camera carrying the "Pro" in its name.

Industrial Bird Production - Fuji X-Pro 1

Don't ignore photo art - Fuji X-Pro 1

Shadow walk and talk - Fuji X100S

"2" - Paris Street Photography - Fuji X-Pro 1

Paris is a giant catwalk - Fuji X-Pro 1

And while the X-Pro 1 AF is slower than the one on the X100S I still used the X-Pro 1 for most of my photos in Paris. The XF 14mm with it's 90° field of view feels very natural to me and it gives me enough surrounding environment of the scene to put my subject into a context - like the girl in the photo above looking at the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Victory anniversary celebrations Paris 2014 - Fuji X-Pro 1

And the XF 14mm has the wonderful manual focus mechanism that allows me to zone focus the "traditional way" with the focus distance on the lens instead of the "virtual distance scale" in the viewfinder. This is a huge advantage and I really hope that future wide angle lenses (besides the XF 14mm and XF 23mm) and maybe even a future X100 will get this great feature, too.

Cliché Citroën 2CV and Sacré-Cœur photo - Fuji X100S

Spaceship hiding in a Paris metro station - Fuji X-Pro 1

Circle of trust - Fuji X100S

I went to Paris with a very light photo bag and only wide angle lenses. If I would go back tomorrow with a street photography assignment, would I pack differently? Not at all! It was very pleasant to move around freely with a light back and small unobtrusive and quiet cameras. And those are important requirements for successful street photography!

If you have any further questions or want to share your Fuji-X experiences just leave a comment below, Twitter me @HamburgCam or visit

my Homepage at www.MarcoLarousse.com

And if you liked my post I am always happy if you spread the word and retweet, like or google +1 it :-)

Is the Fuji X100 enough camera for traveling? My Copenhagen experiment

I have used the Fujifilm X100 for well over a year now. It was my first serious mirrorless camera as I mainly relied on fullframe DSLR before.

There have been loads and loads of technical reviews posted about the X100 and the fantastic image quality, so let me focus on the question that I read so often in blogposts: Can I travel with only the X100 on my side? Here is my real life travel experience:

 I planned a photo trip to Copemhagen last year and wanted to start an experiment by only bringing the Fuji X100 as my digital camera. As reported in a previous post about my recent trip to Paris with the X-Pro 1 (

Traveling light to Paris with Fuji X-Pro 1 and X10

) I used to carry way too much heavy gear with me when I travelled. The fear of missing a shot because I did not have the right lens or flash with me was always present when packing the gear. But this time it was different.

Only the X100 - and I did not even have a spare battery at that time. And there was actually some room left in the smallest photobag that I owned! In a last second decision I grabbed my 1953 Rolleiflex analog medium format camera and a few rolls of film to fill that gap - something that I never had space for on previous trips :)

It was a funny feeling when I boarded the train early that Friday morning - kind of scared and reliefed at the same time with the light gear on my shoulder...

The X100 taking a photo of this friendly Rolleiflex Alien on the train to Copenhagen ;)

The trip was planned to mainly visit the Copenhagen Jazz festival and to stroll around the city. But visiting a city without a wider lens than a 35mm field of view? What if I want to photograph architecture? 24mm or 17mm was usually my widest focal length for those trips. Sometimes I even brought the 15mm fisheye...

I arrived in Copenhagen central station and my friends picked me up and took me to the first photographic "must see" location: The famous "Vor Frue Kirke" - the Copenhagen Cathedral. This is one of those locations that screams for a wide angle lens to capture its full beauty. The gear remorse kicked in right away! Great, this isn't going to work with 35mm! Why didn't I bring a different camera and more lenses?

But then I remebered that the X100 has a build in pano stiching program. This is something that I had not really used as it seemed to be more of a point & shoot gimmick to me. But maybe it could get me a decent shot here? The best way to capture the cathederal hallway and ceiling would be in vertical orientation but I had not seen this "vertical panorama" option documented in the owners manual. So here goes the first try:

Vor Frue Kirke - Copenhagen Cathedral taken with Fuji X100 in pano stiching mode

It did work surprisingly well! This was the moment that would introduce a new style of photography to me :)

Take a look at this post to see really cool panos from Paris taken with a Fuji X-Camera:

Cool Panos from Paris

Off to the next challenge - capturing the spirit of the Jazz musicians. I knew that I had to get close to the action in order to get strong images. A 35mm field of view is a first row shooting lens and 12 MPix sensor resolution won't let you crop forever. But the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is a really open and easy going event that allowed me to get almost as close as I wanted:

The facial expression tells it all :)

The outdoor venues were a breeze with the X100. But focusing did get a lot tougher inside the dimly lit Jazz clubs. At the time of this trip the X100 was still in its early stages of Firmware updates. And the contrast auto focus and manual focus was not really up to speed in low light back then. So I did have to do a lot of trial and error, but ended up getting some nice shots:

Play louder, I can't hear you! ISO 3200

Lost in music

While moving from club to club I came across this cool looking vintage Volvo.

If James Bond would drive a Volvo it would be the P1800

When I reached the famous Nyhavn canal it was time to try if the pano mode also worked in "traditional" horizontal panorama orientation

Another opportunity to use the pano function in vertical orientation was close by, though :)

And just in case you care to see one of my Rolleiflex photos, this is what I made out of 2 photos (6x6) from my Rolleiflex at the Axelborg staircase:

Copenhagen Eyes at Axelborg building - 1953 Rolleiflex with Kodak Portra 160 VC

My resume about the X100 as main travel camera on trips:

I would not hesitate to only take the X100 along when going on a trip - as long as I can live without more zoom than the 35mm field of view that the X100 offers. Croping a 12 MPix image on a good resolving lens gives you some room to enlarge a subject but it is not an endless option.

On the wide side I think that the panorama function on the X100 can easily minimize the need for a wider angle lens.

If you feel that you do need more zoom or a wider angle at times, I would opt for an additional small camera companion like the Fujifilm X10 or a Canon S95/S100 instead of taking a big DSLR with lens(es). This way I have the option to leave one of the two "smaller" cameras (X100 or the compact camera) in the hotel room - but you can't really reduce the basic size of your DSLR camera body.

The X100 is today a much better camera than it was when I traveled to Copenhagen. Fuji has constantly listened to us photographers and implemented improvements in each firmware upgrade. Kudos to Fuji for constantly improving the X100 :-)

Leave a comment below or tweet me @hamburgcam if you have questions

And if you liked my post I am always happy if you spread the word and retweet, like or google +1 it :-) 

Fuji X-Pro 1 goes to Paris

Every year I try to go on a weeken trip with photographer friends. This year we decided on going to Paris. This wasn't our first trip to Paris so I have a pretty good comparison on my experiences from previous photo visits.

In the past I used to take a heavy full frame DSLR with a bunch of good lenses with me. It seems to me that the burden of owning great lenses is that you have to decide which lens to leave at home and what kind of graeat photo opportunities you might miss due to that.

Once I did lug most of my gear with me through the city all day long that I did realize that I missed more photo opportunities while changing lenses or due to the intimidation factor of the big camera and lens. So this year was the year to go light on gear and still bring back good photos!

This was the lens line up I took along on my last trip to Paris:

And this was my gear I took along this time: Fujifilm X10 and X-Pro 1 (plus the Fujinon XF 35mm lens that was already packed in my jacket's pocket at the time I took this photo :-)

My photographic mission on this trip was to use the X-Pro 1 for raw street photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson took many of his photos in Paris so this seemed like the perfect spot for me to give it a try. I converted most of these images from color into black & white in Adobe LightRoom 4.1

It was really easy to go around take photos almost unnoticed with the small and unobtrusive X-Pro 1

Framing and timing shots was really easy as I saw people walking into the scene before they were in the frame - thanks to the rangefinder style viewfinder of the X-Pro 1

I also found the color to black and white conversion to be quite eays in LR4

And just in case you are wondering, the X-Pro 1 is capable of color photos, too ;)

Over all the city travel and street photography experience with the X-Pro 1 was very pleasing. The weather ranged from rainy to sunny and hot and I only had a small and relatively light ThinkTank Retrospective bag with me all day. There were few occasions where I would have wished for a bit longer focal length, but on those occasions I pulled out the X10.

There's more to come from my Paris trip and I'll post some really cool Fujifilm X10 shots later...

If you have any further questions leave a comment below or Twitter me @HamburgCam

And if you liked my post I am always happy if you spread the word and retweet, like or google +1 it :-)