I’ve been using the new Fujifilm X-S20 for the last week around Lisbon. It’s an update of the X-S10, a camera I really like and still use it today for my videos. Thanks to Fujifilm Portugal for letting me borrow it.
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I’ve had the new Fujifilm X-T5 for a couple of weeks now, and in this review I’ll give my thoughts on Fuji’s update to the X-T4 and how it compares with the flagship X-H2 cameras. *Actually the camera does feature F Log 2 video recording. **Apologies for the occasional dropping of focus. I was using my X-S10 and hadn’t set the auto focus settings correctly.
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I’ve been using the Fuji X-S10 for about a week now. This isn’t an in-depth review of all the cameras details and features or a technical break down image quality or a comparison with other cameras. Instead, it’s an overview of how the X-S10 compares with the X-T4 and X-T30 for shooting landscapes and video.
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I’ve just returned from leading a workshop in the gorgeous rolling hills of Tuscany and next month I’ll be in Iceland to lead two workshops in some of the most stunning landscapes in the world. However, when I’m not travelling I often lead small or 1-to-1 workshops in my home city of Lisbon and on the coast here.
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Since I first started landscape photography I’ve always enjoyed making long exposure images of water. I love the surreal feel it gives the landscape, and in this video I discuss the gear and technique required to shoot them at one of my favourite locations in Carrasquiera, Portugal
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I’ve just finished leading the Wild Coast, Lisbon workshop on Portugal’s west coast, an area I’ve been photographing for over 10 years. Workshops are always lots of fun, it’s such a great experience to be able to lead people to some of my favourite locations and help people develop their technique.
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Street photography is for me one of the most trickiest aspects of photography to do well. It’s one of those things that seems so simple until you try to do it. The best street images create curiosity in the viewer, there’s the suggestion of a narrative; who is this person, what are they doing, etc, and also there’s a clarity and simplicity of composition that’s incredibly difficult to achieve when photographing complicated and dynamic city streets.
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I've been playing around with the Mavic Pro for about 3 months now, getting more confident with flying it and trying to get the best out of the drone. I've experimented with both the camera and gimbal settings to try to get the footage looking as smooth as possible, and last week headed out to the forests of Sintra at sunrise to make a short video about what I've found works best.
The camera is sensitive to sharpening. Reduce it too much and the Mavics noise reduction turns shadows into mush, removing detail that's impossible to put back in editing, but have the sharpening too high and it produces a lot of artefacts and moiré in repeated detail.
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Back in February, Hugo and Mauricio from Fuji X Passion joined me for a day of street photography in Lisbon. The plan was to spend a day, from sunrise to sunset recording a film while exploring and photographing in this beautiful city.
I wanted the film to show what an amazing place Lisbon is with its atmospheric neighbourhoods, winding streets, steeps hills and views across the river, so I planned out a day where we would see as much as possible, starting with sunrise looking out across the rooftops towards the river, and finishing with a sunset, again above the river, but this time next to the beautiful modern architecture of MAAT.
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Carrasqueira is a location I've photographed many times, but not for a couple of years and not since I'd made the switch to Fuji. With the skies looking interesting I made the hour and a half drive down to the estuary of the Sado river hoping that even though the tide was going to be quite low, there would still be enough water to shoot long exposures.
As it turned out I was disappointed, the water had receded revealing the mud that the piers stand in. I'd also hoped to shoot some video, but the wind was so strong that it proved impossible, even with a microphone. The sky, however, was lovely and I passed the time there looking for alternative compositions and attempting to shoot the location in different ways to how I had done previously. It's always great to be out with the camera, particularly in such a peaceful place with a sunset like this, and while the images won't make it into my portfolio it was still a worthwhile trip.
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One of the things I’m most excited about doing in 2017 is learning how to use video more. There’s such a massive potential now with so many really portable high quality video cameras on the market, as well as the fact that Fujifilm have well and truly nailed video in their new cameras.
Of course this means learning a whole host of new skills, from shooting video and capturing good audio, to editing the footage and cutting music in. Then there are screen recordings, time lapses, there’s just a lot to learn and it’s going to take a long time till I’ll feel remotely competent.
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Since I switched to Fuji last summer my passion for just going out and taking pictures again has been completely rekindled. When I first started photography around 10 years ago my first inspiration and images came from the coastline around where I lived.
It was photographing the local coastline that I learned about using a tripod, about long exposures, and about using filters. I loved the energy of the sea, and would head out to the beaches around Lisbon with my first dSLR and try to capture the water moving around rocks. It's a wonderful place for landscape photography, although some of the locations here can be a little challenging to get to. At Cabo da Roca, mainland Europe's most westerly point, a lighthouse sits atop 100 meter high cliffs that are constantly battered by the wind and waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Back in October I got together with Hugo and Mauricio of Fuji X Passion to make a film about shooting landscapes on the coast of Portugal. We wanted to make a film that captured the spirit of photography, as well as covering all the practices in the field as well as post processing.
Despite being pretty unlucky with the weather, which is usually interesting in October, we had a lot of fun shooting at one of my favourite locations, the beach of Praia d'Ouriçal at Portugal's westernmost tip of Cabo da Roca. It's a tricky beach to access and carrying numerous cameras, a drone, heavy video tripods and 5 or 6 bags down to the beach was a lot of fun, but it's the kind of place that when you arrive it always feels worth the effort.
We shot the ocean here, looking at how to capture movement in the water and composition, and despite having heavy cloud and little direct light, it's still an atmospheric and fascinating location to shoot.
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Over the course of this year I've been to some incredible beaches on Portugal's coast. While researching and shooting with my friend Rob for the Alem Lisboa guide book and hiking project we've been working on we've headed out to some pretty off-the-beaten-path locations, and Praia do Giribeto is certainly one of them. Located at the foot of what at first seem to be sheer cliffs, the beach is described on a local website like this:
"The access is via a dirt path by the villages of Assafora and Magoito that ends in a high difficulty trail on the cliff top, towards the sand. It's advisable to access the beach by sea."
On closer observation however there is a clear path going down which the fishermen use, and in the particularly steep places there's a rope to hold on to. So access isn't super easy, but it's not as tricky as beaches like Ouriçal and Aroeira further down the coast.
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Lisbon's newest museum opened recently and I've been there a couple of times now to photograph it and see how it would work as a location for street workshops. I've walked and cycled past the site many times since it's been under construction and it always looked as though it was going to be a fascinating building. The sweeping curve of the roof, and it's location right next to the Tejo river within sight of the 25 April bridge really are perfect for photography, and facing south it works both as a sunrise and sunset location.
It gets pretty busy, so it's a great place to photograph people, but also it works well for long exposures with moving clouds, or to do close up architectural abstracts. It's a great place to shoot, and somewhere I'll be returning to in future
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Corvo, oh Corvo. Population 468, the most isolated and small of all the Azores, and a place I'd wanted to see with my own eyes ever since I first saw images of it. Getting there though is not always straightforward. There aren't daily flights to its tiny airport, and the two boats that go there each day are often cancelled or late due to be weather. Our boat was a due to leave at 16h30, so we arrived at the harbour a little early only to be waiting until almost 19h before we left. I did mange to capture some shots and portraits of this gentleman who'd been an inhabitant of Corvo all his life.
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The island of Flores is about as far west as you can go and still be in Europe, although technically it's on the American continental plate and moving 2cm further away from the European mainland each year. We landed in lovely sunshine, picked up the rental car and headed across the island to the cottage we'd booked in Faja Grande on the western side of he island. Flores is basically a large plateau, so going anywhere involves driving up and across the top. The road up has some fantastically dramatic scenery, but sadly once we reached the top we couldn't see anything as the cloud had descended so low that visibility was little me then 50 meters. When we reached the other side however we started to descend and as we dropped out of the clouds the views were magnificent. The cliffs are covered in lush vegetation and waterfalls tumbling down to the faja, the flat piece of land between the sea and the foot of the cliffs. It was late in the day and he sun had passed beneath the cloud and was saturating the cliffs in light and colour.
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On our trip around the Azores we'd planned three nights in Faial, mostly because I was fascinated with the view it had of neighboring Pico and its mountain, but we soon realized that it was a beautiful island in its own right.
On our first day there we drove over to Almoxarife, a small village on the coast on the other side of a headland from the capital Horta. It's a reall pretty little town and we spent a large part of the afternoon diving into the sea from the concrete piers with the the locals. The beaches here are all pretty steep and rocky, and there's something incredibly enjoyable about leaping into the ocean like that. The water in the Azores is much warmer than in mainland Portugal and in such a hot and humid place it was great to jump in.
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This year Teresa and I decided that we'd like to see more of Portugal so instead of booking an exotic trip to someone far away we've gone on short trips to different parts of Portugal, from Porto in the winter to Alentejo in the spring. For the summer we decided to spend 10 days travelling around some of the islands of the Açores, a place neither of us had ever visited and didn't really know much about. The Açores is an archipelago of nine volcanic islands pretty much in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean midway between Europe and the USA.
The first part was planning which islands to visit. São Miguel is the obvious one, but it's also the most touristed and best known. I spent some time researching the islands and it quickly became apparent that Flores, one of the western most islands, was the one I wanted to photograph most, and next to that is the tiny island of Corvo which also looked stunning. I also wanted to photography Pico, Portugal's highest mountain, which can also be viewed from the neighboring islands of Faial and Sao Jorge. Both of these islands looked lovely, but as there are direct flights to Faial from Lisbon it made sense to spend some time there. So our final plan saw us flying to Faial, picking up a rental car and then catching a ferry for the 30 minute trip to Pico.
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About ten years ago now, not long after I'd first got seriously interested in photography, I made the hour and a half journey down to the small fishing village of Carrasquiera on the edge of the Sado estuary. I'd seen pictures of the fishermen's piers there, the cais palafita, and wanted to see if I could make a good image there. Piers are the kind of subjects that work really well with long exposures, so I took a thick neutral density filter and my tripod and arrived just before sunset.
That evening I was fortunate enough to get some of the best light and colour I've ever seen and took a couple of images that changed my perspective on photography. In some ways it was the beginning of my photography journey, when I realised how powerful photography could be and how much I enjoyed waiting for the light.
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