Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Leaves in Rain

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Leaves in Rain
Leaves in rain, Portland, Oregon.

Leaves in Rain. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Leaves in rain, Portland, Oregon.

Californians have been dealing with strange weather patterns for more than a decade now — a five-year drought, a few years of way above average rainfall, and then the current season that has been almost completely rainless up until now. As I write this the pendulum is apparently about the swing the other direction, and the forecasts for my part of the state predict an “atmospheric river” storm later this week that has the potential to bring absurd amounts of rain over the course of a few days. It seems to be feast or famine, though the amount of recent rain famine has been the biggest concern.

While this photograph is evocative of the weather we’re about to have, it comes from a naturally wetter place a few hundred miles to the north, namely Portland, Oregon. On a spring visit a few years back we ended up in one of that cities urban parks on a cloudy and wet day, and as we wandered though gardens I stopped to photograph these leaves.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Commentary

Desert Mountains, Blowing Dust

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Desert Mountains, Blowing Dust
Immense desert mountains partially obscured by blowing dust.

Desert Mountains, Blowing Dust. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Immense desert mountains partially obscured by blowing dust.

For some reason, this week I seem to be reviewing photographs from Death Valley and many of them want to be monochrome. This is the second in two days. Recently I’ve been thinking about the subject of rugged, desert ridges receding into distant haze, and when I came across this old raw file it seemed to fit right into that theme.

My recollection (not completely certain, since the photo was made nearly eight years ago) is that we were headed up Death Valley towards a dust storm rising in the flats and dunes north of Stovepipe Well. That’s not an uncommon occurrence at this time of year. The atmosphere was filled with that diffuse haze that often develops around dust storm, and as we approached the source of the blowing sand we began to see clouds of dust rising above the landscape in the center of the valley.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Equipment, Reader Questions

A Reader Question about Travel Cameras

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A reader recently posed some questions about choosing a camera system for travel. I’m sharing and edited version of his post here along with my response. He wrote:

I wanted to ask for your camera intellect on something I was thinking about. Canon was closing out the 5DS-R completely so they were selling brand new 5DS-Rs for a very low price.. So I bought a brand new one and it’s been terrific and I don’t regret it.

I want to do some travel, including some overseas, as soon as COVID allows. I don’t want to drag around a 5DS-R and a bag of heavy lenses all across Europe and elsewhere on a long trip. I also don’t want to invest heavily in another cameras and lenses. Because I have several Leica-R lenses that I use on my Canon with a lens adapter, maybe that would be a good alternative because I already have most lenses I would need…

My response:

I’m afraid that I have no experience with Leica cameras, or at least so little that it probably isn’t helpful.

My travel kit for urban trips, including those long European visits, is based on a Fujifilm XPro2, one of their excellent APS-C cameras. I mostly work with a set of small primes, though I’ve been known to carry at least one larger lens for occasional use, too, though I would usually avoid this for travel.

My most used lenses are smaller Fujifilm primes. To produce a very small camera/lens package I most often have the little 27mm f/2.8 lens attached. I bring along the 14mm f/2.8 for wide angle needs. For flexibility, and because I do night street photography, I also put the 23mm and 35mm f/1.4 lenses in the bag. Recently I’ve carried the 90mm f/2 rather than the 50-140mm zoom on occasion. On long trips I may add a small “travel tripod” for occasional use — it is nowhere near what I use for my regular photography, but it will do in a pinch… and it isn’t too heavy/large to bring along.

The primes work really well for me because so much of my travel photography leans toward street photography. But another photographer could easily prefer to use a couple of zooms, and there are quite a few options along those lines, too.

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Commentary

Fujifilm XPro Camera System

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Fujifilm makes a variety of interesting APS-C (cropped sensor) cameras with different body designs, including from the DSLR-like XT series, the minimalist fixed-lens X100v and similar models, the tiny XE series, and the XPro designs. Unlike most companies making digital cameras, Fujifilm tends to put the same sensors in cameras of a particular vintage (which today means a 26MP APS-C “x-trans” sensor) and differentiate among the cameras in functional ways — size, types of viewfinders, physical controls, IBIS, price, etc.

After engaging in some discussions about some of these cameras recently, it occurred to me that despite doing about half of my photography with one of these Fujifilm cameras I haven’t written a lot about them here recently. So this post takes on some of the key features of the XPro line and some of my thoughts about the current state of this type of camera. (I mostly will not address general topics here, such as the cropped-sensor versus full-frame comparison, or the pluses/minuses of the Fujifilm x-trans filter array, etc.)

Fujifilm X-Pro2
Fujifilm X-Pro2

The XPro cameras

Fujifilm has now introduced three cameras in this series, the XPro-1, XPro-2, and XPro3. All of them share the rangefinder-style body design. They are not true rangefinder cameras since they use a non-rangefinder system for focusing, but the experience is fundamentally similar to using old-school interchangeable lens rangefinder cameras. This similarity isn’t just about looking or feeling like a rangefinder camera — it is also about including dedicated physical controls knobs (and buttons and switches) for a lot of camera settings such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO, exposure compensation, and more. While most modern cameras use a modal digital interface, where a single button or wheel may do many different things, on the XPro bodies you can, for example, go straight to a physical aperture ring to change the aperture. If you used those older cameras — or just happen to like them — these cameras are likely to appeal to you.

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