Up Where We Belong

dscf4783FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (17.4mm, f/8, 1/180 sec, ISO200)

Or back where we belong. Another vacation in the South West of the USA. It is trip number five within six years! This time we started in San Francisco.

First I need to admit that I can’t keep up with my traveling. A couple of weeks ago I finished posting about my 2014 vacation in the USA. The first one where I took only Fuji mirrorless cameras because of two injuries. In 2015 I went to the USA too but this time with all my Canon full frame gear, a Sony A7R plus the Fuji X T-1 with the 14 and 27mm. I haven’t posted anything from this trip yet so I decided to skip it for now and post about this years vacation in the USA where I took nothing but Fuji again for a very simple reason. I sold my Canon gear before I went on the trip.

The complete list of what I took plus why I sold my Canon can be found here: http://www.littlebigtravelingcamera.com/?p=9279

But in short my new Fuji X Pro-2 replaced the X T-1 as the main camera and I sold my Fuji X Pro-1 right after my trip in 2014. Outdoors I shot mostly with the zooms. The XF 10-24 was mounted on the X Pro-2 and the XF 55-200 on the X T-1 most of the time. But when I planed to shoot mainly with the tele zoom I put that on the X Pro-2.

img_3311Canon PowerShot G7 X (8.8mm, f/2, 1/30 sec, ISO125)
img_3312Canon PowerShot G7 X (8.8mm, f/2.8, 1/30 sec, ISO125)
img_3314Canon PowerShot G7 X (8.8mm, f/1.8, 1/30 sec, ISO320)

I also brought the Canon G7X as a side shooter and for selfies but I did not use it a lot. 1. For me there is no point to shoot a point and shot 😉 when I have a camera bag with a better camera with me. 2. It seems that I’m not a selfie person.

My wife shot with a Sony A6000 plus 18-200 OIS but next year I think it will be replaced by my X T-1 in order to simplify the workflow. I’m sure that I will get a Fuji X T-2 before the our next big vacation because it is hard to switch in between the X Pro-2 and the X T-1. The X Pro-2 simply is so much better in terms of EVF brightness and clarity, responsiveness and shooting experience. And it has a better image quality too.

After we landed and picked our car and went straight to our hotel. Too tired for sightseeing but I took some shots of the planes. Even though we were rather close the planes were not very loud except for the big birds like a Boeing 747 or an Airbus 380. We went to bed early after a very long day.

dscf4753FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (200mm, f/5.6, 1/1600 sec, ISO200)
dscf4766FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (200mm, f/5.6, 1/1400 sec, ISO200)
dscf4788FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (12.6mm, f/7.1, 1/105 sec, ISO200)

Next morning I woke up long before sunrise and watched TV. My wife woke up later but there was still plenty of time before breakfast so we went outside to take some pictures of the sunrise.

A beautiful sunrise at the bay. Hard to believe that we were just outside the parking lot of our hotel which is extremely close to the international airport of San Francisco. I also took some shots of the incoming planes but preferred the shot below. Those images look so peaceful it is just magical.

dscf2518FUJIFILM X-T1 (200mm, f/4.8, 1/640 sec, ISO200)
dscf4789FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (10mm, f/8, 1/80 sec, ISO200)

On this trip I finally have a real super wide angle zoom from Fuji. On the trip two years ago my widest lens was my Fuji XF 14mm. Still my favorite lens but for landscape photography you can’t beat the flexibility of a super wide angle zoom. All the wide angle focal lengths in one single lens is hard to beat plus the 10mm (or 15mm on full frame) is just amazing. It gives images a spatiality that you can’t get with a longer wide angle lens like.

The year before I shot the fantastic Canon EF 16-35/4 IS on a Sony A7R and while the image quality of this setup was a notch above of what I can get out of the Fuji XF 10-24/4 OIS and the Fuji X Pro-2 the difference in real world is not so big. And the shooting experience is much better on the Fuji. The Canon/Sony setup was manual focus only and white balance was off a lot of the times too. So many times that I set WB to cloudy on the Sony and left it there for the whole trip. On top of that the whole setup was unbalanced. A big lens with a small camera attached to it.

The Fuji X Pro-2 of course was different. Very well balanced, a fast autofocus and Auto-WB was spot in most of the time so post processing basically means to apply VSCOs Velvia preset on the RAW files and to adjust the shadows if necessary. I’m back to enjoying photography instead of spending time in front of my computer.

Time for breakfast and to start our fifth road trip in the USA.

dscf4790FUJIFILM X-Pro2 (10mm, f/8, 1/55 sec, ISO200)