The spirit of Munich captured with my new Fuji X100F

I want to share my further experiences with my new Fuji X100F with you. I had a long weekend in Munich last week and my new camera sniffed some Bavarian air. I tried to capture my daily experiences and the places we went to. Here is a little commented selection of the resulting images. All photos are out of camera with some retouching done with snapseed on my phone. This combination is great to create some great images on the go without the need of a software like lightroom. I don't need to mention again that all Fuji camera have great color profiles that produce great results (even without editing).

At my first day in Munich I convinced my wife and friends to go to a third wave coffee place called Gang und Gäbe. We had some great roasted beans from Ethiopia, Honduras and Guatemala and I asked the owner for a portrait and the result can be seen above. I only had a few seconds to take the shot and I wanted to create a little sense of depth by using an open  aperture at f2. The cafe was very dimly lit so the auto ISO was at 3200. I gave the owner my business card and shared the resulting photos with his Instagram account.

The window of the cafe and the street scene behind it also got my attention. I took the photo above because of the woman sitting next to the window looking onto her mobile like she was praying to god. The guy in the background was the icing on the cake. The exposure compensation wheel is pure bliss when you want to archive this kind of a silhouette-photo. Just raise the camera and dial in a negative value and you're ready to shoot.

Praying

The last photo is a good example for the spirit of the Bavarian area. There are many (mostly) catholic churches and in the south of Germany there more people who believe in god than in the norther area. You will find more places where people are celebrating a mass than in Hamburg.

When you enter a church you must be very respectful, not behaving like a tourist and if you want to take some nice photos you need to be stealth. The quiet leaf shutter of the X100F is a pure joy in such situations because there is no loud shutter noise disturbing anyone around. The discrete size of the camera is also a big plus inside a holy room.

 

I also tried to avoid the classic tourist shots you can find all over the internet. Sometimes the reflection of a church from the windows of a brutalist concrete building can say more about the architectural mix in Munich than the typical travel guide offers the viewer. Sometimes you will miss the different focal lengths of an interchangeable camera system like the XPRO2 but the limitations of the X100F are also helping you to focus more on the subject. So it's a different and lighter approach when you on the go with friends and don't want to spoil the group spirit with too much photography stuff. This is the reason this camera is my nearly every day camera.

Versatile and quiet

That would be my two words to describe my experience with my new X100F. The camera is small enough for a tiny bag or hanging with a strap around my neck (cam behind my left arm) and quiet like a leaf(!) in the wind. That makes this APS-C sensor equipped camera versatile because it will take great images even in situations where loud shutters would spoil everything. The aperture and focal length combination is also good enough for portraits and landscape shots.

I will post some more photos in future and tell you about my experiences.

Cheers,

Nils