Diaries of a Photographer: Holiday

I recently went on a holiday to see a friend down on the south east coast. I took my bike expecting to get a lot of free time to myself and figured I could visit some of the towns and cities around. This decision determined what camera I would take away with me; the D3 being far too big without adding lenses in the equation and the X100 fitting perfectly in my saddle bag made it a no brainer. Naturally I feared that I'd be limited with a 35mm equivalent lens, even though I now use mostly primes on my D3 I still have some flexibility.

My fear, however, was unfounded. The X100 has fast become my favourite camera due to it's flexibility, it might not have an array of lenses but it is small enough to take anywhere.

f4, 1/900, ISO 200

The first thing I noticed was how amazing the colours are, incredibly vivid even compared to my D3. I'm not a user of cheap glass on my Nikon and I use mostly primes, so the fact that a compact blows it out the water was surprising; the D3 just can't keep pace on the blues at all.

Second was how quickly I realised manual focus was easier than auto on it, most if not all of the images are manually focused. Hyperfocal distance is obvious through the finder and for up close objects everything moves into focus so smoothly. I'm really looking forward to having peeking focus enabled.

Thirdly was that the dual finder is more useful than imagined. I spent a great deal of time composing on the optical finder before switching to the EVF to fine tune. Sometimes I just went with the OVF blindly.

Here are a few shots from Margate, Reculver and Dover (yes I cycled to all these places, great fun)!