Today has been a wonderfully sunny and warm day for a Sydney winter that has been the coldest on record for the last forty years and tomorrow, Saturday, was forecast to be equally sunny.
Then tomorrow’s forecast was updated to mostly sunny with some cloud and I was reminded of a project I shot in the Sydney CBD a year before the pandemic began, one where I made some of my favourite images for some years.
That day was mostly sunny with some cloud and there was always a soft edge on the sunlight coming out of a mostly blue sky, probably the same kind of mix of hardish and softer light that tomorrow may bring.
I much prefer hard-edge laser-beam sunlight for urban documentary photographs in summer and winter, particularly winter with its low-angled sunlight throughout the day, as those long shadows take on a life of their own and can act as counterfoils or echoes of the figures projecting them.
So I thought it might be a good idea to re-process this set of photographs from February 2019 that I made with an ungripped Fujifilm X-T3 and Fujinon XF 8-16mm f/2.8 R LM WR Red Badge variable focal-length aka zoom lens kindly loaned by Fujifilm Australia.
The sunlight wasn’t particularly laser-beamish, the specular highlights weren’t particularly sparkling and the sunstars this lens makes so beautifully rarely made an appearance, but there were quite a few people on the streets in a way that has become rarer since.
I re-processed these images with DxO’s Fujifilm Astia colour reversal film simulation for the sake of the skin tones and DxO PhotoLab Elite’s DeepPRIME XD denoising and demosaicing algorithm and while the full-sized JPEGs look amazing these 2048px-width JPEGs still look better than their earlier versions from 2019.
DeepPRIME XD seems to reveal even more detail with increased tonal and colour separation in the low values and I’ve tended to make my images darker in the low values than I used with earlier versions of DxO software.
This may be a temporary thing but I will see what I make of tomorrow’s photographs in the Sydney CBD where I may well use one of DxO’s colour negative film simulations instead.
Meanwhile I’ve just updated all our DxO software due to the new versions supporting Fujifilm’s X-S20 camera and I’d love to see what DxO PhotoLab Elite et al makes of X-Trans raw files from that camera and the Fujinon XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR ultra-wide lens.
I’m still learning what DxO’s latest versions can do and what they permit me to do that I couldn’t before.
Most of these photographs were made around 15mm, though, with a few at 8mm and I suspect I’ll be favouring our Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R for photographs depicting people more than architecture, but we’ll see what ensues on the day.
The X-T3 was ungripped, having neither Fujifilm’s VG-XT3 Vertical Battery Grip nor MHG-XT3 Metal Hand Grip attached, and I recall having some misgivings about the lack of balance between the rather lightweight, smallish camera and the large and weighty lens.
It would be wise to try out the XF 8-16mm on an X-S20 with its pronounced grip for such a small camera as well as on the X-H2S and X-H2 with their very impressive built-in grips and even more impressive Fujifilm VG-XH Vertical Battery Grip.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings, but fingers crossed for no clouds and nothing but blue sky and laser-beam sunlight.
It might be a decent trial run in advance of the coming months if not years of El Niño.
Links
- B&H Affiliate Link – Click here to research and purchase or pre-order your choice of cameras, lenses and accessories for stills photography and video production whatever your genre and subject matter.
- DxO – website – PhotoLab, FilmPack, ViewPoint, PureRAW, Nik Collection – Our #1 choice in raw image processing and editing software.
- FastRawViewer – website – “Is your RAW converter slow while building 1:1 previews or culling RAW files? Use FastRawViewer – a great time-saver and an ideal RAW workflow helper.“
- Fujifilm X Global – X-S20: Explore the unseen world
- Fujifilm X Global – XF8mmF3.5 R WR: Everything is in my hands
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