Fujifilm X20 – the first update

So here is what I’ve decided to do about writing an X20 review: it’s actually going to be a series of short (ish) updates as, and when, I have got something new to say about it.

Typical UK road sign: the weight is given in metric units whilst the distance is in imperial. Are we European or aren’t we? ©Neil Turner, April 2013

I have been shooting with the new camera as much as I can and in as many different situations as I can. I’ve even used it as a third camera on a live commission. Most of the time I have been using the Fuji RAW mode so that I can get the most out of the files and so that I can compare the different ways that you can choose to work with the images. Most people prefer not to have to read long and drawn out musings when they look at reviews – they just want to cut to the chase and so here are a few likes and dislikes in the form of bullet points:

LIKES

• The colours – straight out of the camera you have clean, realistic and accurate colours. This shouldn’t be a surprise from the company that brought you Fujichrome all of those years ago.
• Smooth tonal range – at low ISOs the files have a wonderfully smooth tone
• Handling – the X20 feels good in my hands and it is very easy to hand hold down to some pretty slow shutter speeds.
• The manual zoom – it is a model of how other manufacturers should be building cameras – enough said.
• Buttons and dials – related directly to handling but I felt that the way that Fuji have kept the number of buttons down whilst giving you a lot of freedom to customise deserves credit.
• The optical viewfinder -  it works really well and the addition of shooting information in the viewfinder is a big bonus.
• Auto Focus – it is good for a compact and tracks moving subjects rather well.

DISLIKES

• The battery life is not good when shooting with the LCD screen on. It’s a good job that after market NP-50s are so cheap.
• The Fuji RAW format (.RAF) takes a lot of computing power and a lot of getting used to.
• Low light performance – I was expecting this camera to be a couple of stops behind a DSLR but I would estimate that it is at least fours stops worse than a Canon EOS5D MkII
• Video – it is just not that good or easy to use… and don’t get me started on playback!
• Battery clip – if the small clip that holds the battery in place lasts as long as I tend to keep my compacts I will be surprised.
• Buil-in flash – it is as weak as consumer models and you have to remove the lens hood if you don’t want horrible shadows across your pictures when shooting flash.
• Auto white balance – it isn’t that bad actually, except under mixed lighting when it is a bit unreliable.

I like this camera… a lot. That having been said, I am genuinely disappointed with the files at anything over 640 ISO and there is a build quality question mark on the battery clip – especially as you are going to be swapping the battery out for charging with great regularity. If I needed to, I could shoot some editorial assignments with the X20 and that isn’t something you could say about many compacts. More importantly, I would quite enjoy doing so and that isn’t something you could say about any other compact that I’ve used. Professional photographers talk about their “walk about” cameras and the X20 is certainly my choice for that task. It isn’t the “best” at anything but it does represent a good set of compromises and that, at the end of the day, is what you want from a small camera.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this will be a series of updates rather than a single “this is my opinion” review. At the recommended selling price the Fujifilm X20 is a little expensive but the price is coming down on a weekly basis and once it dips under £400 it will become a well-priced piece of kit.

Hero portraits

A few months ago I got a call from a designer who wanted me to shoot some pictures at a gym in east London that would be used in many different ways but primarily as huge prints in the window of their high street premises. My instructions were to shoot what he called “hero portraits” of some of the gym staff and of the two owners who are both fitness experts. That was the extent of the advanced briefing.

©Neil Turner. March 2012, London

The designer was there on the day to act as art director and I turned up with plenty of kit: cameras, lighting, backgrounds, clamps, clips, gels and plenty of batteries. The day started with a quick chat, a couple of test shots and then we decided to shoot “black on black on black” – the team were all wearing black gym kit, we made use of the black rubberised floor in the free weights area and I brought in a six foot by four foot matt black folding Lastolite background. We settled on a mixture of strong side and back-light with some very warm gels being used in different ways in each of the four main shots.

Shot one was of one of the owners who uses boxing and boxing training to work with many of his clients and with some of the group classes he teaches. We went for a simple composition with him putting up his guard as if the 24”x36” soft box that was about four feet away from him was his opponent. That gave us the main light and I used a second head with a grid diffuser behind him to accentuate the shape of his shoulders, neck and head. The first few shots featured black boxing gloves but that was just one bit of black too far and so we swapped them for red and the resulting images were very pleasing.

Shot two was his business partner who does fitness classes and we featured her with a large blue medicine ball, three quarter length and slightly less side lighting.

©Neil Turner. London, March 2012

Shot three was of another male instructor who specializes in power training and he suggested that we used a variation on the American Football quarterback starting position. This was the most fun image to shoot because the shapes were instantly graphic and the light was almost instantly correct. The floor featured in this shot for the first time and so I needed to make sure that it didn’t dominate the composition. In the end I made sure that only the smallest area around his feet had any light on it at all and some nearby kit was used to “flag” the area – stopping unwanted light hitting the rubber tiles.

The fourth and final of the hero portraits was about physiotherapy and for that we had a client sitting on one large blue ball using a blue soft tube across his shoulders to stretch and twist. Four very large prints now feature in the window of the gym. Heroic!

The best lens for portraits?

On a photographers’ forum last week there was a lot of discussion about the best lens for portraits. Can of worms opened. Mac vs PC or Nikon vs Canon style debate well and truly started.

I have written before about portrait lenses and I won’t bore you with repeating my previous post (if you missed it, catch up here) except to say that when people ask this question they normally mean headshots or mug shots where the subjects head and shoulders will fill most of the frame.

©Neil Turner, February 2012. Bournemouth.

This portrait of a local artist was shot using an 85mm f1.8 Canon lens wide open but what lens should you use for this kind of picture. The debate will rage and answers anywhere between 85mm and 135mm (all measured on full-frame cameras) will be given, supported, doubted and even ridiculed. Most arguments that don’t get broad agreement also don’t have a simple answer. Sure there’s something lovely about the feel of a portrait shot on an 85 but what about the degree to which you have to invade the subject’s ‘personal space’ to get the composition? What about those 85mm lenses where the close focus isn’t good enough to get that bit tighter still? With a 135mm lens the personal space issues largely go away and the close focus issues almost always go away too – but is the effect as nice? Can you ever include something of the environment in those pictures? Would you even want to?

The actual answer (as always) is that it depends on you, your technique and your own taste in pictures. A few weeks ago I was looking back at some corporate headshots that I had shot and I had to tell another photographer on the other side of the world how I had shot them so that he could replicate them so that when his pictures and my pictures were printed on the same page nobody (hopefully) could tell that two photographers were involved. One of the things I needed to give him was the focal length of the lens used so I got the pictures, went through the EXIF data and noted it all down. I had used a 70-200 f2.8L lens and so the actual focal length was between 120mm and 130mm.

I was a little surprised that it was that long and so I grabbed a folder of images that I keep on my hard drive of corporate portraits to show prospective clients some examples of what I have done in the past and looked through the EXIF on those. These were pictures that, by definition, I really like and it quickly transpired that the tighter compositions were all shot between 120mm and 150mm on the 70-200. Again, quite a surprise – I had always seen myself as an 85mm lens user!

Well, one thing led to another and I decided to do a quick ‘audit’ of all of my favourite environmental portraits to see what lenses I have favoured. This was less of a shock because in the folder of 120 of my favourites the widest lens used was 16mm (on a 1.3x crop body, so we’ll call that 21mm for the purposes of this exercise) and the longest was a 300mm (on a 1.6x crop body which becomes 480mm in this context). There was a lot of bunching in the 35-45mm area and some more around the 120-150 area but the spread of focal lengths was otherwise pretty even – which pleased me greatly because it confirmed what I always say to others;

“There is no such thing as THE perfect portrait lens”.

This exercise is a bit time-consuming but it could have a lot of uses in professional photography. For example, anyone used to zooms wanting to buy a couple of prime lenses should think about going through the exercise to help them decide which ones would suit their style. Anyone wanting to know what lenses to replace as a matter of priority in these cash-strapped times could also benefit from a focal length analysis. The reverse is also true – a photographer who wants to change the way they do stuff could see what they normally shoot with and deliberately avoid those focal lengths. The possibilities are endless once you start to think and we can all do with a bit of style analysis from time to time. How we choose and use lenses has always been a preoccupation of mine and this exercise has helped me to rationalise that.

Indeed why stop there? EXIF data is amazingly useful and so you could also do an aperture comparison. My quick one revealed that I shoot a surprisingly large amount of pictures using three apertures f2.8, f8 and f22. In my sample, those three apertures accounted for over 50% of my pictures. I’m not sure what to make of it but I will work it out one day.

©Neil Turner/TSL. January 2008, London. 173mm focal length on a 1.3x crop body = 225mm

What started out as a simple answer to a simple question somehow turned into statistical analysis. Many people would say that is the exact opposite (they might even use the word antithesis) of what we, as creative people, should be doing. I have a lot of sympathy for that argument but, in a world where there are tens of thousands of great photographers vying for work, every little advantage we can eek out for ourselves and every piece of information that we have to work with could just be worth it’s weight in fluorite glass.

BMX Rider: Contact Sheet

©Neil Turner. Ringwood, Hampshire. 2011

This was a set of pictures shot on location as part of a “how to do it” technique piece for Photography Monthly magazine. The idea was simple – use flash to make something very cool from some sort of active sport. I was put in contact with the tier, Keegan Walker, through a young photographer that assists me from time to time on commercial shoots and we arranged to shoot at the skatepark near where they both live which is about ten miles from my own home.

I used a couple of Canon EOS5D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS lenses as well as the excellent Elinchrom Ranger Quadra flash system supplemented by a couple of Canon 580exII Speedlights with Elinchrom Skyport receivers triggering them. There were plenty of clamps, gels and light modifiers in use too – including my rather lovely modified beauty dish and the equally great Chimera 24″ x 32″ soft box.

The sky at dusk is my favourite backdrop for all kinds of shoots and the May evening sky provided us with something special to work with. Keegan is pretty good at what he does and I had to ask him several times to actually get less height from the ramps so that my pictures looked better! Two hours on a nice evening messing around and shooting pictures is a pretty good way to make a living. The unfortunate part of this particular commission was that I had to write the words that described exactly what I had done and how I had done it. One day I will get around to reproducing the whole piece for you.

Folio photo #15: Thoughtful businessman, London, April 2008

©Neil Turner/TSL. London, April 2008

This portrait of Swedish businessman Anders Hultin was taken during an interview for The Times Educational Supplement. He worked for a Swedish company Kunskapsskolan who were working in the UK and are hoping to take control of two Academies in the London Borough of Richmond-Upon-Thames.

The interview took place in a small office in west London and, although his English was first class, he took time to consider the answer to each question allowing me to get a great range of thoughtful expressions from just about every angle. I chose this profile frame because I liked the blue background and its simplicity. All of the other angles had complex and intrusive backdrops which I used a range of lighting styles to hide. The available light was very good for a short period and so this is one of a dozen pictures taken without flash.

When I chose this picture for my portfolio it was one of three business style portraits that all had strong blue backgrounds. I like to pace the pictures in my folio and by having a small group of images with a theme it seems to give them more strength and help with the pacing of the selection.

Geek stuff: The whole shoot was done with two Canon EOS1D MkII cameras and my trusty set of three L series Canon zooms: 16-35 f2.8, 24-70 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8.

Portrait: Marsha Hunt, London, 2005

©Neil Turner/TSL, October 2005. London

Marsha Hunt is an actress, writer and model who shot to fame in 1969 when she was appearing in the musical “Hair”. She has a child with Mick Jagger and was famously photographed naked by Lord Lichfield. In the early part of the new century she had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Her treatment became a documentary and she was photographed once more by Lord Lichfield. This set of pictures were taken for a feature in the TES Friday Magazine about her life and her memories of her own education at the London home of a close friend of hers.

This portrait was a lesson in letting the subject run the show. Marsha was lovely, as was our host. They were very old friends and chatted most of the way through the session. The wonderful thing was that she knew exactly when and how to look at me and at the camera. Models are good at this and actors, for my money, are better. It would seem that when someone has been successful as both an actor and a model they are better still. Some people are ultimately very comfortable in front of the camera and Marsha Hunt is in the top few percent of them. The shoot lasted a lot longer than it needed to – we chatted about all sorts of things and drank some rather good coffee too. It was a good day.

Geek stuff: In common with just about every other picture shot by me at the time, I was using a pair of Canon EOS1D MkII cameras with 16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L IS lenses. The lighting was Lumedyne Signature series packs and heads mixed with a fair amount of ambient light.