Canary Wharf

I bought myself a Fujifilm X-E4 just before Christmas. I asked the nice people in the Fuji shop in Covent Garden for their smallest, lightest, cheapest, easiest-to-use camera with a 50mm-equivalent lens. They conferred for a moment and then suggested the X-E4 with the 35mm lens, which is 50mm-equivalent for the APS-C sensor. I tried it, and it felt and looked right, so I gave them all my money. Since then, I've been getting used to it, learning about the features, and how to set it up simply to take the kind of pictures I take. As I get familiar with it, I will no doubt use more of the features.

The X-E4 twice the price in real terms of the Olympus OM10 that was my first proper camera back in *cough* *splutter*. It takes fabulous pictures. There's none of the wonky geometry at the edges of the frame like earlier APS-C cameras used to have. The amount of detail in the pictures is way over anything a standard film camera could provide. As for colour, it's Fujifilm. It's what any piece of tech should be: good enough so I can't blame it instead of me for poor results.

So I'm having to get my eye back in, and most importantly, having to learn to see big pictures rather than to pick out some details and zoom in with a telephoto. I've done that. It feels great for a while. I saw a YT photographer doing it a while ago, and realised I didn't want to do that anymore. It's a phase one goes through. Cropping is fine, zooming is for sports photographers.

The first dozen or so outings are probably not going to produce good photos, except by luck. It takes time. It's partly about learning to use a camera again, and partly about learning to see a scene, and then to take a photograph of it. Here's the first real outing.