iPhone SE vs Fuji X-E4

Take a look at these photos.

The first is from the X-E4. The colours are rich, the details and sharpness are out of this world, one can zoom in and get all the details. But the sky is blown out. That might be me being incompetent, but I don't think so. That's what happened with film, and Fuji are all about making digital photos feel like film. So the sky blows out.

The second you will have guessed is from the iPhone SE. The detail is almost all there, the colour is almost all there, but it doesn't have the presence of the Fuji photo. It does have, however, a detailed sky with clouds and blue bits. I've noticed this before: my iPhone camera seems to be good at not getting blown out by skies, and I'm thinking that's because the iPhone is a way more powerful computer than the Fuji, and the camera software can identify and treats skies differently to the rest of the photograph.

Thing is, call me old-fashioned, but I find the iPhone picture almost unrealistic. That's not how I saw the scene, as I was concentrating on the loco, not the background. I don't want all that background in such detail - it's a distraction. I deliberately have my lens at f4 (f8 equivalent 35mm) to blur the background for that reason. The iPhone gives me detail all the way back. (There's probably an app for that, but I don't have it.)

I didn't do these consciously as an A-B comparison. So maybe if I had filled the iPhone frame with loco to the same extent that the Fuji frame, the iPhone would have blown out the sky.

Beyond that, there is something about iPhone photos, or at least those from the SE. They just don't have the weight or the depth of a real camera, and I grant that's partly because the Fuji has about four times as many pixels. I hadn't been able to see it quite so well before.

Some Features to Add to the Fuji X-E4 - And Any Other Camera

I've been having problems using the Fuji CamRemote app on an iPhone SE2 with the X-E4. Using the remote view, the screen freezes intermittently. I've e-mailed the Fuji Support people, tried their suggestions and still get screen freezes. I suspect it's the app - Fuji are a camera company, not a user software developer. (The CamRemote app is... junk. Let's be honest.)

This got me thinking about what I wanted from a camera, now that I've been using one for a while.

Tl;dr - The Prime Directive of prosumer camera design is immediate use: pick it up, press the shutter and it takes a photograph. No prep, no remembering to do this and that. I want my camera to be situationally aware and behave accordingly. I also want it to have roughly the same level of security my iPhone has, and I want it to work with my phone. I have my phone with me all the time, and so does everybody else. Unless we're swimming. But then we wouldn't be using a prosumer camera.

My ideal camera has motion sensors, and knows how to use them.

It wakes up from low-power mode when I pick it up and bring it up to my face. Add in other circumstances when you would like it to wake up automatically. Pressing the shutter button, or release cable. Pivoting the back-screen (while the camera is stationary), for instance.

Put the camera down, it goes into low-power mode. (There's a setting in The App to tell the camera it's on a tripod and should stay awake.)

When the camera wakes up, it reads the its dial settings and compares them to what they were when it went to sleep. If there is a change, it gives me a message on the screen to tell me which dials have changed and the previous value.

Because I'm a normal person, my phone is on and in my pocket. When the camera is turned on, it connects to my phone by Bluetooth whether The App is running or not. It does not stop the music from playing. It plays nice with everything else Bluetooth.

There's a Bluetooth symbol on the camera screen: red when the camera isn't connected, and blue when it is.

When I start The App, and the camera is on, the camera date and time, and its location, are updated automatically. If Location Services are not running, The App and the camera just shrug and carry on. (It is ridiculous that I would need to say this, but Fuji's app has kittens if you don't enable Location Services.)

When I take a photograph, if The App and Location Services are running, the camera grabs the location data from the phone (via The App) and adds it to the image meta-data.

I can use The App to configure the camera. The App menus have the same structure as the camera menus. (Photographers have a lot of muscle memory invested in their camera's menu system.)

The camera has all the usual effects and features, and these are turned on / off and organised into configurations via The App or in-camera menus.

The camera has manual dials for configuration, shutter speed and exposure compensation. (Aperture is set on the lens, and the camera knows about it.)

Configurations include a full Auto mode, Aperture Priority (set shutter speed + ISO automatically) that use defaults for all the other settings, and eight (?) custom settings. Custom settings are differential: everything is default unless it is changed.

I can change and save new default settings. Because the custom settings are differential, we won't need to update all our custom settings.

If I turn the lens focus dial, that over-rules the auto-focus settings until I take a picture.

I'll get back to you about ISO.

There are three function buttons to set to do whatever I like.

The camera lets me look at my photos and zoom in on screen. There's no in-camera editing. Everyone has editing software on their laptop / phone / tablet.

I'll get back to you about Wi-Fi. Fuji's Wi-Fi is awful.

The camera connects to my phone / laptop / tablet by USB-C for image transfer. (There is a version of The App for tablets and laptops as well.) There is a setting to transfer the photos (RAW and / or JPEG directly to my device's standard Photo library, right after the files are written to the card in the camera. (May need some buffer for photos, depending on write speeds.) This provides rudimentary tethering on the cheap.

I can use The App to update the camera firmware over USB-C. Or I can update it from a memory card. Either way, when it updates it asks me for a passcode.

Far too often security makes life more difficult for the user, and doesn't trouble the bad guys at all. Dumb amateurs will steal a camera and throw it away if the security bricks it; smart thieves will know how to get round almost anything; and if I'm trying to keep stuff from the Three-Letter-Agencies I should probably not be using a prosumer camera. The only group of people who can be kept out are the casual snoops and prying eyes. A simple passcode stops them. Every time I tried to figure out what more to do than a passcode, the potential breach of the Prime Directive was too much. If you can do better, please do.

When it is powered up the very first time, the camera will ask you to set a passcode. Access will last for a time that can be set in The App (default 24 hours), after which the passcode screen will re-appear and the camera won't work until it gets a passcode. The passcode can be changed via The App, but not via the camera.

A special memory card comes with the camera. It and the camera share an ID number nobody knows. If the OS on the camera goes, put this card in the slot and power up. It will re-load from scratch and then you can re-update online. (If the camera BIOS gets corrupted, send it back to the manufacturer.)

If you use the power switch to turn off the camera, it will ask for a passcode when it next powers up. (But not when it wakes from low power within the passcode window time.)

So we have a camera which has all the photography features of your favourite camera, won't work unless you sign on (like your phone), will save battery when it's not being used, will take photos when you click the shutter button without you having to do anything else, can be configured from an App or in the phone, and can tell you that a dial got jogged while you were not using it. It has a discreet but visible logo to indicate it is a "secure camera". The dumb thieves will still steal it, but the smarter ones will find an easier target. If stolen, it will be useless within a day no matter what happens.

And one more thing: The App and the camera software are not written by anyone who has ever produced user software of any kind for Fujifilm. Or possibly any other camera company. Dear camera industry: get your apps designed and written by people who understand how to do this stuff.

Taking Pictures With the X-E4: Some Default Settings and Habits

(I had a series of posts about how I took a bunch of under-exposed pictures. Re-reading them recently, every one was close to gibberish. I've done the right thing, and removed all but the last two. The one about crop ratios and camera maths stays, as does this one about my default settings, which has been edited to make sense.)

Nobody writes detailed instruction manuals anymore. I used to like those. Now one has to experiment. Which is easy to do on a technology one already knows, but learning a new technology by experiment is very messy.

So the result of learning what I could about digital camera technology as implemented in the X-E4 is this:

My default settings are 0 for the exposure compensation; f4 for the aperture; A = aperture priority for shutter speed, and an ISO bracket between 160 and 800. There's a post that explains the f4 setting choice.

I assigned the Quick Menu to the Q button, and reduced the number of options to eight. One is always the Custom settings. The others are: ISO, Film Simulation, sensor format, Clarity, Grain Effect, Colour Chrome and screen brightness.

I created two custom settings: one for colour film (Provia) and the other for black-and-white (Acron). I turned the Autosave Custom Settings to OFF, so I could see that I had to Save the changes. When you save a Custom Setting, all the other settings are saved with it as well as the ones you consciously changed. Aspect ratio, file size, sharpness, the works. This is actually a Good Thing, because there are many other things you may want to tweak along with the film type.

I bought a BlackRapid RS-4 Camera Sling. This wonderful gadget lets you slide the camera along the strap up to your face. Ordinary straps make you move the strap. Watch a YT video about the BlackRapid.

I am also bedding-in two habits: checking the dial settings before I take the first shot, in case anything got jogged; and looking at the first shot I take to make sure it is in the mode I want. So the photos I took on the next river ride were a lot better than the horrible ones I took going down to Barking.

Also, here's a video. It's not great, and the wind noise is terrible, but it's one of the first videos I shot with this camera.

Can You See The Mighty A2, The Famous Roman Road, In This Picture?

 

The A2 is that big ol' road that's full of lorries waiting to get onto ferries at Dover. Three lanes, backed up for five miles, and that's on a good day. It's one of the great importing roads in this country and therefore in the world, the UK having the fifth largest economy in the world.

It was based on the Roman road from Londinium to Doverum (or whatever they called it, I'm sure Wikipedia has the proper answer). So that makes it pretty important at the London end as well.

Can you see it in this picture?

Yep. On the right. No barriers, no signs, barely any traffic and this was mid-day Thursday.

This is what the A2 looks like at Blackheath, just outside the walls of Greenwich Park.

I wonder if this happens to other famous roads in other countries?

Barking Riverside

Everyone should visit Barking Riverside by boat. The ride down goes past all the fancy skyscrapers and riverside flats of Docklands, passes the O2 at North Greenwich and then after a couple minutes more of smaller riverside flats on the south bank... you're in the wide open river with nothing higher than the flight of a seagull to your left or right. The flatlands of Essex and Kent. I'll have some pictures of that later. Barking Riverside is in the middle of nowhere, literally, and yet less than, what? five miles from Docklands?

 

The View Upriver From North Greenwich

This is the view from the Uber Boat heading downriver (and so looking upriver from the back) across the North Greenwich peninsula and across the Isle of Dogs, which is where most of 'Docklands' is. 

I was working in 'Docklands' when Canary Wharf was being built, and most of the buildings in this photograph were not even the dreams of developers. Where did all these buildings come from? More to the point, where do the people come from to pay the rents or mortgages (residential) or sit at desks that companies are paying rent on. 

I'm never really going to believe it's all real, no matter how many times I visit the place.

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.