Let me be clear from the outset, this is NOT a review of the Fuji X100 series cameras! This is just my experience with these cameras, notably the original X100 of which I owned 3 or 4 over the last 2 and a half years.
I owned DSLR cameras until 2012, when I noticed that I hardly ever took them out of the camera bag (and said bag stayed put under my desk). As I really like photography and wanted to do much more of that, I started to study reviews etc and found the amazing X100, with all it drawbacks of slow focus, miserable manual focus ability. I got one used off ebay, a very nice and clean one, and had lots of fun with it.
Then the retro look struck me, hard! It reminded me so much of my good old film cameras that I bought some, lots of them, traded them in for other film cameras, tried the X-E1 to get away from all this trading, and still bought more…. GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) had hit me, and hit me bad.
I sold the X100, bought another one, re-sold it , re-bought one, in short, I was stuck in a situation where I had lots of cameras and didn’t really use them because it was hard for me to chose each day, which one to take for a spin. And there might still be better cameras out there, you know…
Then I decided to assess my situation calmly. I checked my photos, those I took during the months of feverish GAS activity, and lo and behold, something struck me:
Most of the best photos I took during those GAS days were taken with film cameras!
Most? Well, thinking of it, it was nearly all of them. So what should I do? Make a choice, a radical choice perhaps, but a choice that allowed me to use the cameras I liked the most, which were all film cameras. At the time I had bought the very fine Fuji X30 as my only digital camera as I thought this one camera with a very good zoom lens, able to do gorgeous macro work, would be my all in one only camera.
I sold it!
I sold most of my other film cameras, the Olympus 35SP, the XA and XA2, the Lubitel MF camera, all the bunch. I only kept my Olympus OM2n and the Olympus Trip 35.
So Fuji got it wrong! Their fabulous X100 with it’s gorgeous feel of a good old film camera did them no good, at least for me. I quit digital – should I say for now or for good, who knows – and I am very happy with my remaining film cameras. I started developing my films myself last year, I scan them, as I am very unsatisfied with lab prints, at least B&W ones, and perhaps one day I’ll try wet printing. We shall see.
So for now, after months of nothingness, here is at last some new contents for my blog. I hope to keep up with regular posts now.
See you soon !
Frank Lehnen Photography 