There has been lots written on the Fuji X100 and for the most part my feelings are on par with theirs but I’ve also found out a few things about the camera and my shooting style that I hope will be of use. The image quality of the X100 is by far the best I’ve seen out of a camera this size and I’ve owned both Olympus and Panasonic micro four thirds cameras. ( I still own the Panasonic GF1 ) To get a proper perspective on my thoughts over the last thirty days of X100 time you should start with my last two articles, Fuji X100 First Reactions and Fuji X100 Thoughts after two weeks.

Rangefinders are a breed of camera all to their own and something I had not personally spent much time with so this was an all too new experience for me. Sure I’ve had some point and shoots that had a optical range finder on them but they were laughably small at best and totally inaccurate at worst (Canon G9 I’m looking at you). The X100 on the other hand is pretty accurate in optical mode and obviously accurate in electronic mode since your seeing what the sensor sees. It’s not that it’s a bad implementation of the viewfinder, it’s actually very very good but coming from years of SLR’s and DSLR’s I found it very hard to work in rangefinder mode. I like to see the focus come around and make slight manual adjustments to them as I see fit, rangefinders don’t allow this. Your either letting the autofocus do all the work or distance/zone focusing.

It’s a plus and a minus and I’m sure as you get used to the viewfinder always being in as much focus as your eye is and either trusting or guessing at the focus of the camera you can maybe work more on your composition. I’m just not at that stage with rangefinders so it was a tough thing for me to get used to. I found myself just working on my composition and then in post process being upset by the results of the focus or spending too much time on the technical aspect of the camera and not hitting the right composition or moment.

The quality that you can get out of this camera is something pretty amazing however, when the focus is hit dead on you can get amazing results that I’d say are on par with a good middle of the road DSLR. That and the size of this camera make this worth the purchase even if you have to struggle for a while with the concept of the rangefinder. If you have shot with rangefinders in the past or are new to photography and don’t know the feel and flow of a SLR I’m sure you’ll feel right at home with this camera in no time flat.

The menu systems and the buttons themselves are another story, Fuji has put a fairly complicated system of menus into the camera to accommodate all the cool things this camera can do. But it clutters up the retro look and feel that you get when shooting it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will love the JPG styles that are the built into the camera which include Velvia and Provia to match the color styles of two of the best film styles Fuji ever created. But to me it just made the menu’s more cluttered than they needed to be. I’d love a camera that stripped out the fun toys and offered me a very simple menu. This is true of every digital camera on the market though and not something that is specifically Fuji.

Size is big if your going to be traveling and walking and doing things other than photography. The X100 is about the best fit camera I could ask for, I love the size and weight of this camera, I found it to be my favorite camera to tote around when I was not out for just photography. Family trips where I had one of the kids, trips into the city for work, a night out and riding my bike around town. These were what I would consider ideal situations for the X100, it’s small offers great quality and let’s you for the most part just get the shot and move on. In these situations that’s pretty much my full requirements list.

Overall I really like the Fuji X100 and I think it’ll be a great camera for years to come. You do have to be ok learning about how to really shoot with a rangefinder but once you put in the time I have little doubt that this camera will just become an extension of your daily life. The simple fact that even with my struggles with this camera I’ve learned to love it for what it adds and what it takes away says a lot about what they’ve been able to accomplish.

If your looking to buy an X100, I trust my photography purchase’s to B&H Photo in NYC. Check out the X100 at B&H Photo

So I’ve been shooting with the X100 exclusively for about two weeks now and have found it to be both great and frustrating so much of the time. There are small things that just seem to crop up and bug me and push me away from the camera when the look, feel, size and quality of the final shots keep pulling me back to it.

Viewfinder

This was the revolutionary feature of the X100 and it does live up to the bill in terms of the Optical side with it’s cool digital overlays. There are still issues I have with this however, for example you can overlay the histogram in this mode but once you half press the shutter to focus the histogram disappears, you have to then release the shutter to bring back the histogram. My process for focus and exposure adjustments are synonymous I am adjusting both in about the same timing and motion. So when I have the focus indicator where I want it and I press the shutter half way I move on to exposure before the focus is done. This is the fastest way I’ve found to work but on the X100 as I move to exposure the histogram disappears as the shutter has been pressed halfway. Frustrating, as I now have to release the shutter to get the histogram back, adjust my exposure and then return to focus. It’s a small thing I know and something that I can remedy with a workflow change but why it’s like this I don’t know.

Image Review

The X100 is built for taking pictures not reviewing them. The modes to review the pics are just not sufficient, you can see a full LCD screen image without any picture info, or you can see a tiny rendition of the image with the histogram and picture info, leaving so much empty space. Why they couldn’t increase the sizes or do overlays is another oddity. One more item that annoyed me until I found the right setting was even in optical viewfinder mode the viewfinder would switch to electronic after the shot to review the image in the viewfinder. This is totally unacceptable for any real shooting as your blacking out the view of what’s happening for the sake of the review.

Buttons

This was the biggest complaint of many other reviews online, was the size and use of the buttons on the camera. I thought they were being nitpicky when I first got the camera but after a few weeks of use I think they were spot on. The buttons are so easily pushed that when I leave the camera on but I’m not actively using it I’ve found that I accidentally change settings I don’t want changed.

Two week conclusion

It’s tough to figure out a camera in two weeks, it’s tougher to figure out the X100 in two weeks! This camera has so many things to offer and so many things to like that the little things that annoy me when using it are just that annoyances. They detract from the overall feel of the camera but they don’t stop me from using and liking it. Especially now that I know the menu system and can get it back to the settings I want it’s must more enjoyable to use.

So Fuji has been nice enough to send me an X100 to test out for the next month. I got the camera just in time to head out on a trip to Vail for a wedding which was great timing. I knew already I didn’t want to take my big camera setup as I was not going to have a ton of time for photography. The X100 fit the bill perfectly with it’s light weight and small size.

For those of you not familiar with the camera I’ll do a short recap, if you want the full nitty gritty please check out Fuji’s site. The camera has a 12mp APS-C crop sensor which is very large for this type of camera, a 23mm fixed focal length lens and a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder.

I’ve been shooting this for about a week now and my first reaction to this camera is that it’s a very good small out of the way camera with a few great features. First off is the viewfinder, I love the optical viewfinder with the information overlay along with the framing lines. One of the features I loved best however was the digital level and histogram that are still present when shooting on the optical side of things. The switch to the electronic viewfinder however is not my cup of tea, it’s quite a difference and makes me feel like I’m working on a low quality cell phone type display. The best part of the electronic viewfinder however is the automatic exposure response, dial up the exposure compensation and you see it get brighter etc. The bad part of that is the quality of the screen is just not good enough yet to allow you to make a proper decision about exposure from it. Keep on using the histogram.

I’ll have more info about the X100 in the coming weeks including some sample images. Tune back soon to see more.

This is the third part of my series on the TTG Cart CE, in this part we’re going to go more in depth on the Cart portion of the system. If you’d like to see our past articles please check out the Gallery review and the whole system overview.

What are the main things you need from an e-commerce system that you’ll use to sell your photos?

• Easy to set up
• Integration with your online galleries
• Billing System
• E-Mail confirmations to both you and the customer
• Pricing structures

Set Up

Building your cart is pretty easy, you will go through many of the same steps that you went through with the gallery for the design. You’ll need to set up your menu’s and logo, header and footer and colors.

Integration with the Gallery

One of the cool aspects of this is the integration with the Highslide Gallery is so easy. To get started you’ll need to set up the full url to the cart system in your gallery and assign a pricing value to your gallery. (See pricing structures below). That’s it!

Billing System

You have two options with the Cart CE, utilize PayPal or just get customer information and follow up for billing.

Lets focus on the PayPal set up as I think that is going to be the most useful. The set up is multi part but still very simple, you’ll first need to start with a PayPal account, once you have this you’ll get live and test values that you can input into the Cart settings. Once you have this all inputed you can toggle the settings from Live to Testing. This will let you test orders and make sure everything is working before you start driving customers to your site. The guys at TTG have even gone one step better and provided test settings from their PayPal accounts to make things easy on you.

E-Mail Confirmations

Now that someone has purchased a photo from you, you’ll want to make sure that they get a confirmation email they can use to make sure they know the order has completed. It also gives them a way to stay in touch with you regarding the status of the order. The system will also email you to let you know that someone has ordered and save a copy of the order to the server just in case the emails get lost in the mail so to speak.

Pricing Structures

This is one of the easiest aspects of the systems and that’s saying something as the whole thing has been easy to get running. You can create multiple price lists on your server, they are simple to create as they are just simple text files. Then you can assign a price list to each gallery individually. If you’d rather add a price to individual photos you can add the pricing information to the meta data of the images and your gallery will pick that up as well. It’s a very well thought out and designed system.

• One of the items I thought was missing from the system however was a way to offer packages of prints.
• The other main omission I’ve seen with the pricing is the inability to offer promotional codes for discounts.

Overall

The Cart CE system is a great product for a simple easy to set up gallery where you can sell you photos online. It has quite a few great features that allow you to price all your different albums or even pictures differently. There are plenty of design options and php hooks that allow you to customize you galleries to your liking. There are a few features that seem to be missing that would allow you to drive more sales like the discount vouchers and package sales. With a few of these small changes this would be a great system for most photographers.

See our online Demo
Pick up the Cart CE at The Turning Gate

In our last installment covering the shopping cart system and web gallery from The Turning Gate we took a top level look at what it could do and got to see a demo of the system. Today however I wanted to take a deeper look at the options available to you and how you can jump in and customize the gallery to your liking. First to recap, TTG Cart CE allows you to create a full gallery and shopping cart system that you can put online and start selling your photos with. What’s great about the system is out of the box you can get everything up and running in a very short amount of time with very little technical know how.

TTG Cart CE uses the web galleries sold from TTG to integrate your shopping cart. This means that you are at least currently limited to the design options available from TTG and that have been converted to support the CE Cart. As of this review that means the the TTG Highside Gallery, this is an easy to use and good looking gallery with plenty of customization options. One other thing to mention here is that the gallery utilizes the Highslide JS library, this is a licensed library and you’ll need to license this from HighSlide for an additional $29 for a single site.

Design Options

TTG Highside Gallery has a ton of design and configuration options available to you. I’m going to outline a few of these -

• Thumbnail Grid : Cell Styling
• Image Sizes both Thumbnail and Full Size
• Meta Options for Search Engines and Social Features
• Google Analytics Tracking code
• Page Settings including Title, fonts, link decoration and background settings
• Header Settings including logo via Identity Plate from Lightroom
• Menu settings
• Footer Settings

As you can see there are a ton of options and I’ve only scratched surface here, there were a few things that bugged me in setting up my gallery. First some of the settings that should have gone together were inexplicably separated, for example the thumbnail images sizes and the thumbnail container sizes. When I upped the size of my image size the container did not scale, I had to manually adjust those sizes as well but the settings were a long way down the config options. Also because there are so many options the menu for setting them up is very very long, it would be great to have collapsable menus to ease the amount of scrolling.

E-Commerce Options

The Highslide gallery has a few options for selling your photos. The first option is to hook it up to FotoMoto. This is a very easy option to set up, all you have to do is to supply your store id and away you go. The second option is to utilize the Cart CE from TTG, with this option you’ll also need to set up the Cart but you’ll have full control over your website from gallery to purchase. Setting up the gallery to work with the Cart all you’ll have to do is provide the full path to the cart and away you go.

PHP Hooks

So the above options are not enough for you and you want to build in something of your own. The guys at TTG have provided some cool tools to do that. You can specify a global set of functions to be run and inserted into your gallery. A full list of the hooks is available from TheTurningGate but these are the ones that I think you’ll find most useful.

• ttg_user_head – Used to add any script or meta information into your pages.
• ttg_user_menu – Create a custom Menu to be used across all your pages.
• ttg_user_footer – Create a global footer to cross all your pages.

One of the big things I like about this functionality is that you can build these once and have one simple place to update all of your pages. If for example you need to change your footer to include a copyright, you can create it once in the hook and have it applied to all your pages without having to republish all your galleries.

Notable Extras

Social is starting to play a big role in professional photographers getting and showing off their business. The Highslide gallery allows you to link to all of your social sites via a nice easy to use interface, it also lets you decide how big of a presence to make them by giving you icon sizing options.

The other great feature I bet many photographers will take advantage of is the password protection. If you’ve taken photos for a client you can give them a password to view their images online without giving the whole world access to their images.

Performance

Lightroom

The main complaint I have for this system is the slow response and build times in Lightroom. If your dealing with a larger numbers of images for you gallery, the system refreshes and exports previews for the gallery with each change. This means that when you make changes it’s no where near an instant change and at times even on my very new MacBook Pro core i7 I was waiting on the system before I could continue. This may be a Lightroom problem more than a TTG problem but either way it effects the product.

Web

This will obviously be very dependent on your web host but I’ve found the system to be very quick in it’s execution from viewing a photo full window to playing a slide show. It seems to work and load everything quickly. One option I’d love to see is a way to pre-cache the next and previous images in the gallery. For some this may seem like overkill so an option to turn this on/off would be great but I’d rather pay higher bandwidth costs than make a user wait for something to load.

See our TTG Cart CE full review coming tomorrow.
See our online Demo
Pick up the Highslide Gallery at The Turning Gate

Wanting to become a photographer is about the allure of the what you can photograph for most photographers. You don’t wake up one morning wanting to photograph the commute to work or the backyard wildlife. You get into photography to take the special shots and extreme photography is one of those types of photography.

Alexandre Buisse the author has made some of those stunning images where you wish you were able to have taken it yourself but at the same time you know it must have been a very long, hard day to get the shot. The book covers many of the topics that you would expect from a photography book, starting with a talk on the gear he uses and why. From there it’s a talk on Vision and how to achieve the best shot from the situation your in. Followed by example images from the author that talk about not only where the shot was taken but why it works or does not work. Overall a pretty thorough entrance into Extreme photography.

Intermixed in the technical and talks on composition and vision in general are the things that I feel are most often missed when looking at and hearing about Extreme Photography, the amount of work. Not only are the photographers doing the same trip that the athletes are, in most cases they are doing more getting into different positions to get the shot. The images in this eBook are pretty amazing and I’m sure the author has the scars and the wear and tear to prove it.

The only thing I’d mention is I purchased the book via the Craft and Vision iPad app and due to the small font size on each page you have to zoom in to read thus loosing the effect of the image. If your interested in buying this book I’d recommend that you buy the PDF from the Craft and Vision website and display the PDF at full screen to get the full effect.

Purchase at Craft and Vision or in the App store in the Craft and Vision iPad app.

HDR as a tool has had it’s up’s and downs, it’s over use and it’s scene’s where it can really save an image. Although I don’t always agree with RC’s take on what looks good in a final image I can’t argue with his teaching style. The book takes on a simple style that covers some of the more complex topics he uses and does so in a way that makes reading the book and learning HDR photography easy.

Books on digital darkroom technique in my mind have almost always fell flat, they promise to teach you the world only to keep you lost in the clouds. The HDR Book not only keeps you interested but also moves you quickly through the nitty gritty details that you need to know to make things work. Not only does the book tell you of the details of the darkroom side of things but of the optimal technique for shooting and the types of photos that work best in HDR.

The thing about HDR in 2011 is there are really three main programs that are popular for processing your images. This would make things tough for any book but RC bypasses this issue by knowing and using all three. For every tip and example there are instructions for using all of the programs, a real plus for all HDR shooters.

I read the book through and through in about a day, so even though it’s a think book it’s a quick read. Once you get through with the tech details RC offers up a few of his own photos for you to work on along with tips he used in processing them himself. All in all a great book, although I think sometimes RC tends to over processes his photos, his technique is sound. His teaching style simple and easy to understand.

The HDR Book: Unlocking the Pros’ Hottest Post-Processing Techniques

Looking for a way to sell your photos online? Would you rather spend your time photographing than working on your website? Use Lightroom to edit your photos?

What do these three questions have in common, we’ll Lightroom has a Web tab for a reason and the guys over at The Turning Gate have developed a plugin that builds a fully functional store directly from Lightroom, pretty cool.

Design

Out of the box CE Cart allows you to do some pretty basic customizations to yoor design. These will get you started and allow you to get up and running with out coding a single thing. You’ll be able to change your colors, your logo and it’s position. These will all get you going and allow you to make the site yours.

You’ll also be able to change the header and footer of the page to meet your needs. For example you can change the menus and the copyright information etc.

For a full list of customizations check out the Turning Gates website

Cart

With CE Cart you have a couple of options for how you want to bill your clients. You can set it up so they can specify what they would like to buy and have it emailed to you or use a paypal account to bill them online and deposit the payments into your paypal account. It’ll then send you an email with information
of the sale so your an fulfill it and send it off to your customer along with keeping a copy on your server just in case you don’t get the email.

Overall Feel

Overall I felt the CE Cart system along with the TTG Highslide Gallery allow pretty much any one to set up an online store and sell their photos on the internet. I had some trouble with the shear number of settings available in the CE solution when I first got it but after I started using it and learning how to save the settings ( Lightroom menu “Web” -> “Save Web Gallery Settings” ).

Demo

Take a look at the demo I put together to see how it works.
TTG CE Demo

Stay tuned for our second installment on the CE Cart in the next week.

My previous review on the Zeiss 21mm lens has been available for a while, I’ve shot more sample images check them out below -

The GF1 has been out for a few years now (2009) to be accurate so why review it now you ask? This is more a review of how this camera has performed and a quick analysis of how this two year old camera compares to the newer GF2 and GF3 versions that have since been released.

Looking Back

I picked up the GF1 after using the EP-2 for a while and becoming frustrated with it’s short comings. I wanted a small camera that took great photos and fit in my pocket or work bag depending on the day. I wanted fast autofocus, good video, interchangeable lenses and a view finder.

How it performed

The GF1 has been a solid performer over the time I’ve had it, performing as a secondary camera that I keep with me for the day to day shots you happen to run across. It has a fast boot up time, good autofocus and good overall picture quality. I love the top dial for easy access without menus to shooting modes. I’d like even more custom button configurations and a second dial for full manual mode. It’s not a bad design for a small camera to have the shutter and aperture on the same dial accessed via a press to toggle back and forth but a second dial for the thumb or pointer finger would be great.

Compared to the GF2 and GF3

The GF series has been contronversial as a camera, starting with the GF1 giving you easy dials for controlling the shooting modes and making the camera very DSLR like. Starting with the GF2 and progressing with GF3 they seem to be making the camera more consumer and less professional. I’ve not yet been tempted to upgrade to the GF2 or GF3 due to these changes. I much preferer to control my camera with dials and controls rather than menus and buttons.

Best Features

• Small Size
• Great Video Quality
• Easy to use
• Overall great picture quality when shooting RAW

Most Needed Features

• In Body Image Stabilization
• Better High ISO Performance ( Above ISO 400 )
• More Lens selection designed for M4/3
• Better quality EVF

Best reviews from around the Internet

Craigmod
Luminous Landscape

Where to purchase

Pick one up used or pick up the GF3 at BHPhoto