Fujifilm GFX100S Review
An unintended (and very much appreciated) consequence of starting a YouTube channel is finding myself in situations I would never have imagined. So when Fujifilm had kindly sent me the GFX 100S along with the GF32-64 F4 and 80mm F1.7 I decided to photograph something I had zero experience with.
The Farm
Inspired to do a poor man's impression of Randal Ford, I made a list of nearby farms with the plan to cold call them (in the middle of winter) to see if they'd have me come take photos of their animals for a tiny Youtube channel - what a pitch! Despite the odds of success being close to nil, I didn't have a backup plan. I think the universe sometimes rewards the blindly (and stupidly) optimistic, because the first call I made was to Dr. Albert Anderson who welcomed me with open arms. The farm is called Aldor Acres and it’s what Albert calls an ‘education farm.’ He doesn’t attempt to conceal the farm-ness of it all.
I gathered a crew consisting of a fellow photographer friend, Dylan Ackimenko along with his fiance, my wife and 5 year old son. We arrived at the farm, chaos ensued, the extend of which you can watch in the video, and I managed to capture a few useable frames.
The Porsche
Peter, the owner of Flatsix Classics, has become my automotive fixer of sorts. I was desperate to shoot something the day before I had to return the camera and as always, Peter came through with his latest build, a stunning 912. With about an hour until closing, I brought a single strobe and frantically captured a variety of exposures for each composition. The idea with this approach is to selectively merge parts of each exposure to yield a final image to your taste. That same night I uploaded the files onto my MacBook Pro at 10pm, I wasn’t able to pull myself from the computer until about 1am. I was just blown away at the amount of detail in the raw files coming out of the GFX. The combination of the GFX sensor and GF lenses is really something else.
One Last Thing…
It was the morning of my last day with the GFX, but I figured I could squeeze in one last shoot with a special member of our family who happened to just turn 10 years old.
