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The reality of being a professional photographer is that (for me at least) the opportunities to enjoy taking photos for yourself become somewhat limited in number. There are a variety of reasons for this, chief among them in my case is the fact that whenever I pick up a camera these days it feels like I am going to work, so laying my hands on the tools of the trade doesn’t bring with it the kind of excitement I used to feel when I was an amateur photographer. Instead it brings about a thought process that is anything but leisurely in nature. If I have my cameras in my hands I’m usually thinking about pleasing clients rather than myself. In fact, camera gear has become so banal to me over the 15 years since I declared myself open for business as a photographer that I literally only own the bare necessities these days. 4 lenses and 2 bodies. That’s it. Really. Everything I need to do my job is there. That was until just before Christmas 2022 when something new, but old entered the scene. Alan Lesheim (@Alan7140) and I have exchanged many lengthy private messages over the 10 years since he became a member of Fotozones. We were both early adopters of the mirrorless revolution in photography, with me going down the Micro Four Thirds route and Alan the Fujifilm one. We have developed a “pen-pal” kind of friendship that I really appreciate, because if I ever need to know anything about photography he is my go to guy. After reading my November newsletter wherein I expressed a desire to start taking photos for myself again by perhaps investing in a Fujifilm X100 sometime in the future, Alan reached out and offered to send me his original Fujifilm X100 as a gift since he wasn’t going to use it again. I would just need to get some batteries for it as the originals were no longer serviceable. Wow! Talk about suddenly finding impetus amidst the mire to engage in personal photography and gear lust again! Ordinarily I wouldn’t have accepted this generous offer because of the terrible situation with the postal service in my country. There is maybe a 50/50 chance of any parcel sent from abroad actually getting to me when using the PO, such is the level of corruption and thievery going on there. But then I remembered that a very good friend of mine was working a contract as a care-giver in Wales until the end of November and would be coming home to SA just before Christmas. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind receiving the parcel for me and then bringing it with him. He happily agreed to do this, so Alan then sent the camera to him and thus began a countdown as to whether it would get there in time before he went to his next assignment in Essex, England. As luck would have it the package arrived with him literally the day before the UK Postal workers went on strike. After sourcing two 3rd party batteries and a USB charger from Amazon for less than £20 all I had to do was wait for Nigel to get back home, which with all the other strikes that are going on in the UK these days started to look a bit sketchy. But he made it back and I collected the X100 from him on the 23rd of December. From the moment I held the camera in my hands I knew that I was going to love using it. It truly is a unique and masterfully engineered piece of kit, but what I wasn’t quite expecting was the exquisite image quality that comes with this little package. I mean, yes, I had read enough about it over the years to know that this range of cameras has achieved a near cult status among users since it first hit the market, but the images I am seeing from this “mere” 12MP Bayer sensor are just different to anything I get from my MFT kit. The colours are more lifelike and the rendering has this kind of 3D effect that reminds me of my days shooting with Leica 35mm rangefinders. Maybe it’s all in my mind, but I know that I like it. I like it a lot. To begin with there was the obligatory random snapping around the house to get to grips with how everything worked on the X100. It didn’t take me long to familiarise myself with the menu and the few buttons it has. It’s wonderfully simple (unlike the Panasonic G9 I have had for the past 2 years that still has me scratching my head when I need to quickly change a setting somewhere). Operationally you have your aperture ring, a shutter speed dial and an exposure compensation dial. A couple of other buttons on the back and the top plate give you all you need to make whatever other adjustments are necessary to take a pleasing photograph. The D pad and ring around it are actually very similar to what I remember from the Olympus Pen series cameras I have had over the years, just better implemented, it seems. The X100 just feels right. It feels the way a camera should feel to me. It makes me want to go and enjoy photography again, which means that it has already “done its job” of getting me thinking about personal photography again. These interesting flowers only open at night. They grow on a vine that lives on this fence between us and the construction site. The way I have it set up now is to shoot in JPG (fine) + RAW. The Fuji JPG’s are brilliant, but I am always going to want a RAW file to play around with in Lightroom. I have set the top Fn button to activate the built in ND filter, so I can shoot outdoors at f/2.0 and not blow the exposure, then the RAW button is set to select the film simulation for the JPG, since I am always going to have a RAW file captured alongside the JPG. I use Auto-ISO in Aperture priority mode with a minimum shutter speed of 1/30 before it bumps the ISO to the next higher level. The auto ISO mode seems to top out at ISO 3200. You can however select a higher ISO when shooting in regular ISO mode, just not Auto. If I am honest I find that this camera is much more responsive than my 2018 Panasonic G9. It turns on faster, it displays the shot you’ve just taken much faster and it’s also a lot faster to zoom in on the image than it is on the G9. The AF is not as fast but it is a lot snappier than I have read about it in reviews. The one thing that I do find a little awkward to work with is changing the AF point. To do this you have to press the AF button on the left side of the camera and then use the D pad on the right side to navigate to the point you want to use. It is a bit clumsy to operate this way as you need two hands, but I’ll get used to it. Other things I have come to love in the short time I have had it are the tiny little flash, which is fuss-free and offers a decent amount of well balanced fill flash for casual use. Images shot with the flash active actually don’t look like they have been flash lit at all. The macro function is also nice and allows you to get the lens up much closer to a subject, but it isn’t a real macro magnification. Focus confirmation is also different to what I am used to. There is no green dot in the viewfinder, instead the focus point turns green when it has achieved focus. The readout also tells you how far away your subject is, which is the first time I have seen that in any camera. Something I probably won’t use much is the optical view finder. The hybrid OVF/EVF was the big talking point when the X100 and X-Pro 1 were released and it remains a pretty unique feature of the Fujifilm cameras in this rangefinder style. I suppose this is probably useful in dimly lit situations where an EVF might battle a bit, but for me personally I’d rather have a poor EVF that shows me more or less what the image is going to look like before I take it than an unwanted surprise afterwards where I have totally messed up the exposure. So where is my personal photography journey headed now that I am officially inducted into the Fujifilm owners club? As a former GAS sufferer the first thing I did when Alan said he was sending me this little gem is start researching the entire Fujifilm line-up. What lenses are there? What bodies would be best suited to my work? Can I use the system in the same way that I use the MFT system? Then all at once I scolded myself and resolved to only consider the Fujifilm system for my personal photography. There is nothing to be gained by selling off my MFT equipment and replacing it with similar equipment from a different brand. Not a single client will notice and I certainly won’t be able to charge more for photographs made on a slightly larger sensor than the one I have been using for the past 10 years. What I can do though, is simply enjoy the process of making photography for myself with a proper camera again. The X100 will become my trustworthy side-kick whenever I go somewhere and I want to bring back some photos. It lets me get what I need without becoming a nuisance or hindrance to what I want to record. It’s all I will ever need to keep me interested in doing the thing that made me pick up a camera in the first place. Thank you, Alan! Here are some personal shots made over Christmas Day and around the house. Stress relief for my son who still lives at home. Stress relief for his Dad. Me and the Missus. When it rains on Christmas, make a ginger bread house. The kids had great fun building it up, but the eating thereof didn't go down so well!

I am going to make this as short as I can. I think perhaps some of you Nikoniacs also flirt with other brands and "toy" cameras and might be interested. It's impossible to cover all aspects of the camera and for instance dpreview have done an excellent review of it in their usual lengthy style. Personally I've shot some 1300 frames through the X100 over the past few weeks, both business and pleasure. I think I've sort of come to grips with the little fellah. So, this is basically some of the impressions and observations I've made in this time. Body and physical attributes Well, it's kind of small, a bit to large for a pocket (cargo pants would be okay), but at 450 grams or so it's certainly no problem carrying around. It feels and probably is quite solid (mine have hit the floor, literally, lens hood took the brunt of the fall though). It feels like what I call good build quality. Any modern Nikon I've handled D80/D90/D300/D7000/D700/D3 had one or other point where you could feel slight movement in the outer plastic layer, often around the battery compartment. The X100 is as tight as anything and feels like a solid, trustworthy tool, almost like a good slide calliper. General use A lot have been said on the menu system and various firmware quirks and thats with good reason. This isn't a mature camera with several generations of development backing it, more bits and pieces from what is (presumably) Fujifilms compacts. Some of the bugs and quirks will be improved with the promised future firmware releases, some will undoubtedly remain because they are design choices, no matter how much we would disagree. Yet, fact remains, and this is important, the camera works, it shoots, exposes and produces images reliably. No 9 FPS or tracking focus able to follow a 5 year old ADHD kid fueled on ice-cream and cola, but it locks accurately and securely and I've had very few OOF shots, even in poor light. You have to adjust your focusing technique to CDAF peculiarities and find some kind of contrast do drop your focus point on though, especially in poor light. The combination of OVF/EVF/LCD is fantastic, three options of what to look through to frame the shot is very useful and all three "modes" work very well and the switching between them is almost instant. Mine spends most of the time in OVF mode, although I do switch to the EVF for critically accurate framing every now and then. Seeing more than what you get makes it easier to frame and compose shots and also to anticipate things entering the frame. If you've ever shot a rangefinder you know what I mean. The OVF is however much brighter and contains loads more information (which can be customized) than any old rangefinder. IQ This is where the X100 shines - Image quality. A finely tuned lens and sensor combo, although "only" 12mp, can work magic and so does the X100. Images are sharp from edge to edge and have a very fine quality and look to them. The lens itself is not quite as punchy as certain modern Nikon or Zeisses, it's a different kind of rendering or drawing of colors and transitions, perhaps a bit old school or somewhat subdued/neutral but not as cool as a 85 1.4D or 105 DC. The lens is sharp already at F/2.0, but struggle a bit at focus distances shorter than about 80cm, stopping down to F/4.0 at short focus distances puts things back on track. I understand this is down to some of the compromises they had to do to make it so small. At distances beyond 80cm up to infinity everything is pretty much as good as it gets today. Sharpness is exceptional across the frame, some very slight and easily correctable distortion and pretty much non-existing CA or other aberrations. My jaw literally dropped when I saw the first F/2.0 shots at medium distances and at infinity, the lack of nasty mushiness in the corners and flat, consistent frame..well I cannot stop drooling over the files. There's some vignetting, especially wide open, perhaps a little over one stop at most. Being primarily a DX-user, I kind of struggle finding a ~24mm F-mount lens as capable as the Fujinon. Probably the only "modern" performance-wise comparable lenses are the 24G, 14-24G and the Zeiss 21mm, although all these are a bit apples and oranges compared to the Fujinons maximum aperture and crop sensor image circle. I can't resist mentioning that all these lenses cost as much or more than the X100 and are actually physically equally large or larger than the camera. Kind of puts things into perspective even if it's just a silly and not really valid comparison. The files that come out of the X100, be they jpgs or RAWs really have to bee seen and experienced firsthand. The jpg engine is the best I've ever seen, I've never really been that "oooh" over the "famous" Olympus jpgs, but these are something that (almost) makes me reconsider my following of the RAW-cult. The RAWs do remind me a lot of the 12mp Nikon files from the D90, D5000 and D300 in terms of DR and ability to recover highlights and shadows. They don't have quite as much headroom as the D7000, but it's clearly much more refined/evolved algorithms at work here than the slightly outdated 12mp Nikons. The really big difference is the amount of detail. The X100 seems to have a light AA filter and/or better internal processing, because there's more detail than I'm used to from my D90, even with very good glass. I can't quantify this or measure it, it's a subjective impression and should be taken with a few bucketfuls of salt. High ISO noise is something that interests me as I often shoot in very poor light. Simnply put, the X100 is very close to my D7000 in this department, basically meaning a notch or two above the D90, just below the D700 in most areas. The noise is, like with the D7000, mainly of the luminance variety, meaning it's easy to work with. The X100 files do not however retain color as well as the D7000, but it is clearly better than the D90. One of the reasons the D7000 high ISO files look so good is the ability to maintain color fidelity, something even the D700 struggle with, although the D700 have slightly less noise overall. Basically, the X100 performs extremely well and puts the old but tried and trusted Sony (?) 12.3mp sensor to good use, paired with a couple of years worth of development in processing. It's a camera that you comfortably can shoot down to ISO 3200 and even 6400 with careful exposure and post processing. Oh, the places you can go with 1/40th at F/2.0 and ISO 3200! Final words The many nay-sayers, rumors and complaints over the X100 can scare anyone. Yet, the growing enthusiast community, even dedicated forums and the many very, very nice images I saw from it convinced me to give it a go, knowing I could return it. All these people could not be all wrong. Quite frankly, I realize now it's changed the way I shoot and brought a lot of image-making joy back into my life. It goes with me anywhere and I love knowing that I have a camera with me that I trust IQ-wise to the same degree that I trust my DSLRs. For specialized photographic tasks such as macro, sports, portraiture and so forth, there's no way I won't choose to use a DSLR, but for a lot of other stuff the X100 is very much up to the task. Tthe kind of shooting I do, even the paid stuff, is not very demanding and I would not hesitate to use the X100 for an environmental PJ-type portrait for instance. Yet...this is a camera for those who knows what they are doing, accept the merits and drawbacks of a single prime and are able and willing to learn a new camera with a sometimes confusing logic and some quirks. It's no denying that this is a camera that will feel all to limiting to a lot of people and if you come from a DSLR and expect DSLR-like focus performance and burst rates you will be sadly disappointed. IF you give it the time, the reward is a camera that is a pleasure to shoot, use and carry while still giving you images of a quality that rivals the state-of-the-art crop sensor DSLRs out there. I'd actually be so bold, that even with the rather high retail price of the X100, you'd struggle getting better IQ for the same price if you consider what a body and high-grade 24mm lens cost today. In FX land there's a whole forest of great 35mms, but then we're also talking several times the weight and size, lens + body. There's also no doubt people respond differently to a small, "old" camera like the X100 than a huge honking black DSLR. Try pulling up a D3 with a 70-200 in a casual social situation and see how people react. I think that rounds it off. If there's any interest I'll come back with some definitely unscientific image samples and more impressions later on.