I love camera equipment. There’s something magical about how every camera imparts a unique aesthetic onto your photos. Not only is the character of the image different for every camera, but frequently the physical build of the camera can also affect the resulting photos. The way your hold it, the quickness with which you can (or cannot) adjust settings, and the impressiveness of the camera in the eyes of the subject all influence the final image. Something about the Fuji X100s drew me in the first time I saw it. It felt both compact and full-featured, nonchalant and well-designed — it felt like a camera that I would enjoy making pictures with. So, I rented one from BorrowLenses for a month and gave it a shot. Here’s my consensus.
When you first pick up the camera, it’s surprisingly light. It begs to be carried around everywhere, over a shoulder, ready to go at a moments notice. Then, you lift it up to your eye and start to play with it, at which point you realize that—despite its lightness—this is not a toy. The settings and levels of customization go on for days. Definitely read the manual first. You’ll save yourself about two weeks of missed opportunities while stumbling through settings.
There are a few features that made this camera stand out to me. The easy access exposure compensation wheel made it delightfully simple to dial in a particular feel. If you’re in a dark bar at night, you can find the wheel without even looking and with a few clicks you’re exposing at -1.5 for a perfectly dark scene. That brings me to a second favorite thing about the camera, the low light sensitivity is stunning. Some of my favorite photos with the camera were taken in very dim scenes. I will say though that the camera has a tendency to overexpose on average, especially at night, so be sure you’re overriding the automatic functions in low lighting. I also really enjoyed the built-in ND filter. Coming from a world of SLR’s this was a sigh of relief. I was able to shoot outside in bright lighting, and preserve an impressively shallow depth of field by just changing a setting, instead of digging through my bag for the right filter and screwing it on. The RAW files out of the camera also held up to lots of wrenching within Aperture, and produced some really pleasing results when paired with film emulation settings from VSCO.
Overall, I was certainly impressed with this camera. Now, having switched back to my Leica M6, I'm feeling encumbered by the weight and, more than anything, the inability to take two or three photos to compare and refine as I work towards just the right photo that I'm envisioning. The X100s fits into a shooting style that comes from both worlds of camera phones and film photography. I can throw it in full auto and get the camera phone shot, or I can meticulously tweak settings to get just what I'm imagining like I do when I’m shooting film - all in a form factor that's comfortable to shoot with and light enough to carry with me everywhere I go.
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