If you prefer a video version, just watch it here, but if you prefer to read go on.

I’m really glad in January 2020, before the shit hit the fan badly, I decided to start my Black and White Tales project. It was a great way to keep myself busy and stay in touch with the world and my creative mind while we entered the Covid jail we still have to leave!

That project taught me a lot about myself and my photographic style and preferences. I got even more involved with film thanks to the images I found in my archive and really loved.

If you followed the projects from the beginning I owe you a big thank you. If you did not just click here and enjoy it. If you do not click and check it out nothing will happen to you but you will make me sad and that will perhaps heavily influence your Karma!

Another success of 2020 was the publication of my book about fine art ink-jet printing. It is the English version of the one I published few years ago in Italian and contains some obvious updates. Check it out.

The Black and White Spider Award is one of my favorite awards, it always have so many beautiful photographs submitted and very high standards. I had three images nominated, one in the Fine Art category and two in the People category. Not bad at all.

Photography for me is always a great way to meet new people and hear new stories.

In 2009 while photographing Ginseng farmers I took a picture of Abe Vang, a Hmong farmer who was a refugee from Laos and passed away recently. I always loved that picture because I felt a connection with Abraham also if we spoke for few minutes.

Craig Thompson, a comic book designer contacted me to use the picture for the issue about Abe Vang of his comics series dedicated to Wisconsin ginseng farming. It was great to learn Abe’s story and create a new connection.

Even in a shitty year I manage to have satisfactions from my job! Not bad.

Now the projects for 2021.

First of all I will take a break until the end of January, to organize myself and to relax a little.

I have no idea what the year will bring, but the beginning already brought a lot of censorship on social media so I will start to upload my video also on Rumble and move away from FaceBook and other traditional social media. You can find me on MeWe, if you like to stay in touch.

Photographically I intend to produce 10 magazines and 10 fine art portfolios, about 10 different places. I will continue to make videos and talk about the pictures involved in the project… Rumble or Youtube I will find a way also if I expect some censorship due to my libertarian ideas I have no problem to express.

I will also continue the Gear Talk series, so expect more reviews of old film cameras!

It is all for now, stay tuned and see you at the end of the month.

Being an Italian and having to defend an entire tradition and culture, I evaluated various options. At the end I decided to talk about another camera I use so I can recreate an equilibrium!

Ok, just kidding but I decided to talk about the Minox 35GT because is a fantastic camera and has an opposite philosophy to the medium and large format cameras I mostly use.

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Here a couple of example of images enlarged from the original 21.6″x30.8″ at 360 DPI. Click on the details to see them at original size.

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As you can see the sharpness is pretty impressive. In the last example is easy to read the incision on the statue also if the light condition is not the best, being the incision in the dark shadow.

See you for the next review!

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More cameras to come, stay tuned!

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Stay tuned for more camera reviews!

Pentax K1000, a great cheap camera at that times… a very overpriced camera on the used market!

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I promise, next time some camera I love more…

Beautiful lenses available with m42 screw mount. Watch the video to learn more.

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The camera in the video was part of my first Phoenix Photo Project that was recognized at the London International Creative Competition.

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Until the next camera!

I decided to make a series of video about cameras, lenses and other tools I used and still use for film and digital photography.

First review, my first camera: Pentax ME Super.

Enjoy the video!

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In the last days I’m exploring an analogue past and thinking about the digital present.

A lot of water passed under the bridge since my last blog post. My father passed away, my sabbatical I took to take care of him is going to end soon and at the moment I’m putting some order in my home getting ready to sell it and move on with my life.

I come from a family were we used to keep everything and for sure a lot of pictures. Opening boxes and drawers I found the photographic archive of the family, the oldest one consisted in a lot of prints, starting from the beginning of 1900, the newest one, mostly created by me consists in CSs, DVDs and hard disks.

Guess what? The oldest archive is accessible without any tools but my eyes and a source of light, the newest one requires a ton of tools and it is still accessible thanks only to the redundancy I applied when I created it, using different media to store my images, but the CDs and DVDs are almost all unreadable now.

Vint Cref, one of the Internet fathers and Google VP, warned us about a future dark age for images because we will lose them.

I agree with him and this present experience just made me realize how much he is right.

How many phone pictures will be available and visible in 70 years from now?

With the pictures we are preserving history and the truth. Yes, some very famous pictures could had been staged or retouched also during the film era, but the common pictures in the family archives were just real.

Two of the pictures I found and think are really demonstrating the importance of pictures to preserve the truth, are of my grand uncle Ottavio.

These images were taken in an American prison camp during WWII, exactly the US PWE no. 7096-C-Campo 108, somewhere near Casablanca probably. I’m looking for more information about that specific camp, but I was not able to find them online, so if you have info please contact me.
He was in Sicily with the Italian Army when the Americans arrived to free Italy from the Fascism.

I often hear propaganda comparing the USA to the nazi German, specially lately in the absurd political hate atmosphere.

Here you can see the truth. A man with his dignity and uniform in a picture nobody could imagine was from a prison camp. This was the dignity reserved to prisoners in American camps, I’m pretty sure all of you have in mind pictures from Germany prison and concentration camps and I have no need to explain further the difference. Note also that he was able to take pictures and send them home!

After the prisony experience my grand uncle changed… he got the habit to drink water with ice in it and kept the habit all his life! I still remember him telling about his experience and how he never been so well with plenty of food, the use of a Jeep to move around the camp and a lot of other things he never experienced in Italy before.
He was a blacksmith and mostly a horseshoe maker and his skills were considered and put in use with his great satisfaction.

If someone has access to the USA archives and can find some info about his camp please contact me. Here you can see the stamp on the back of the picture.

From the past we can learn a lot of things and evaluate the present based on that. Without it the comparison is lost and we will believe any propaganda about the present.

Every single day listening the news, reading posts on social media or simply speaking with people I hear the planet is going worse, illness are spreading, the number of poor people is increasing, etc. etc.
All this trying to convince us we are on the path to destruction and the only hope is to give more power and money to governments.

A drawer full of old pictures can bring us back to the reality and to see how much better we are doing.

In almost every family until the 1050s, there was the loss of a kid.

In this picture is my father brother, not my uncle officially since he died a lot of time before I appeared in this world.

He died when he was 8, for a simple infection that transformed in septicemia. He lived in a wealthy family and had access to good doctors, but it was not enough.

My father was lucky to live after the invention of penicillin and enjoy the development of medicine and he made it to 91, even with three cancers in him after he was 80, he had a very good and comfortable life until the last day.

A simple picture like this will destroy all the theories telling the world and the human kind are worse than before.

In my mother family there was the same situation. Her sister died not long after this picture was taken and, again, for some simple infection that now days can be simply cured with an antibiotics.

I read posts of a lot of people thinking we cannot be happy with all the things going on in the world, actually we can be very happy because we are alive, a good percent of the population born before the 1950s cannot.

The world is a better place and I do not have to wake up in the morning and break the ice to wash my face. I have current water and heating, something that my mother did not had for a while. We simply not only live longer but we also live better, this is a fact we can understand from a picture, no matter how much BS propaganda we hear.

From the pictures we can also discover that in the relatively close past, when there was much less government control, a lot of great achievements were possible.

When my father got his engineering degree, he worked for few years as teacher and then found a job with a managerial position for the construction of the Place Moulin Dam and the Valpelline power plant.

I did not found only pictures but also a lot of documents.

In Italy the electrical company was nationalized in the 1970s and the new generations cannot even imagine that some huge infrastructures can be built by private enterprises.

In the 1950s the C.E.B. a consortium of private companies, the main one the Cogne Special Iron, started the project to create one of the biggest hydraulic power plants in Italy. Still is very important since is one of the two power plant used in case of emergency to restart the electrical grid and the other power plants on the national territory.
Without the state involved the private consortium was able to acquire the land, create a cable cart for the concrete from the Aosta train station to Valpelline, manage all the relation with the local population, included the people that had to transfer because the dam put village underwater etc. etc.

To give you an idea of the size, the pipes in the pictures are 8.5 feet, go on for 9 miles with a change of altitude of 3000 feet. The installed power is 130 MW. It was built between 1961 and 1965.

If you look at the past you can see that the greatest infrastructures, like the American Railroads, and factories, were created by the idea of some private individual and supported by the companies interested in the project. Rarely by governments.

This is something you can learn from family pictures, printed and visible, found in a box.

There are many other things I learned and most of them are part of my private life and not to share on a blog… but the question is: how many digital pictures, if not printed, will be available for the future generations?

As a last note, I also can see how Venice was much more beautiful with less tourists and most of all, elegantly dresses and not with shorts and flip-flops!!

And now… after I took around 1400… back to more repro!

Digital or Film? Fuji Acros Digital on a XPro-2 compared to Fuji Acros 100 Film on Hasselblad 6×6… who will be the winner?

Few weeks ago I did a non scientific comparison between black and white digital and film, using my beloved Fuji XPro-2 and a Pentax 67 with Ilford FP4.

The article got a lot of interest and was also published on Fuji X Passion magazine.

I decided to improve the test and use Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 film, instead of Ilford FP4 and Hasselblad instead of Pentax. The use of actual Acros film instead of Ilford is obvious and needed for a less casual comparison. Hasselblad instead of Pentax is because I suspected some lack of sharpness was caused by the lenses, and since I have used Hasselblad all my life and I’m sure were the best analogue medium format camera and optics, I simply wanted to eliminate every variable related to the lens.

As I said before:

• I know that, scanning the negative, part of the process is still digital so is not perfect
• I do not intend to give all the answers
• I did this just for fun and to understand myself a little better

How did it go this time and who won? Not easy questions!

Technical premise, the Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 film was developed in Ilfotec HC 1+47 for 8 minutes at 20C, after a 3 minutes prewash in water, and followed by a stop bath and 4 minutes fixing in Ilford Hypam 1+4.
In the image captions there are the specific data for each image.

I started in a snowy day, with absolute flat light and no real highlights in the scenes. The opposite of what I did in the previous test. It was not really a choice, but it was snowing and I wanted to do it anyway… yes, I would rather be in Florida than in the Italian Alps… and not just for the weather!

Fuji Acros 100 – Hasselblad 500 C/M with 80mm f 2.8 – Exposed at 1/60 f 8

First image, a fountain with the church in the background. When I arrived I looked around and thought “1/60 f8” then I took my Minolta Spotmeter and measured the light, exactly 1/60 f8.
I was with Gian Cerato, a dear friend and colleague and asked him what he imagined was the exposure and he told me “1/125 f5.6” and we laughed about the simplicity of film photography. No matter if the best quality is on digital or film, film have the simplicity on its side, once you set the ISO with the film choice there are just shutter speed and aperture that can be set with the old rule 1/ISO at f16 for a sunny day… the table found on every film box!

Please, note the stupidity of Italian bureaucracy that put a bar code for the water service on the fountain… an old fountain with a stupid and ugly white placard very visible from the best point of view. I avoid further comments to not get in jail…

As soon as I took the picture with film, I got my XPro-2 and kept the same settings. Last time I noticed that I always had very underexposed images, even in RAW, if I used the setting from the meter, so I decided to use the Fuji 200 ISO as if it was a 100 ISO to give that stop of overexposure needed in my previous experiment.
Now the image came out one stop overexposed, so I had to trash the jpg and use the RAW and correct one stop… All started to sound strange…

Fuji XPro2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/60 f8 ISO200 – In camera conversion ACROS simulation

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/60 f8 – RAW transformed in CaptureOne 11

CaptureOne 11 has not the Acros simulation… so no comparison here, but I learned a lesson: something was going on in the camera.  The base ISO did not seem to be constant and I was sure the ISO were set to 200 and not Auto.

So in another location I was more careful on checking the histogram and evaluate the exposure.

Fujifilm Acros 100 with Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm f2.8 – Exposed at 1/60 f11

As usual the exposure was perfect with film. With digital I corrected a stop for the difference in ISO and came out almost perfectly exposed.

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – Exposed at 1/125 f11 ISO 200 – Acros simulation, in camera jpg

The tonal rendition is really perfect, the differences between the film and digital simulation are very minimum and can depend more on the developer used than on the film and simulation parameters.

I was positively surprised. Fuji really did an awesome job with the ACROS simulation.

We can see very similar results in the other pictures following. And still the XPro-2 set at 200 ISO continued to act properly as 200 ISO!

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 1/60 11.5 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/125 f14 ISO 200 – Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 1/60 8.5 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/125 f9 ISO 200 – Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 1/60 f8 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/125 f8 ISO 200 – Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 1/60 f8.5 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1/125 f9 ISO 200 Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

For now all is good… exposure perfect using the same setting for film and digital just correcting for the ISO difference.

So I decided to take some pictures inside to test the sharpness and some higher contrast subject.

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 20sec. f8 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 22sec. f8 Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

As usual the film excels in the highlights but this time, with the Zeiss 80mm and Acros instead of FP4 the sharpness is the same as you can see in the 100% enlargement.

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 20sec. f8 Fuji Acros 100 – 100% enlargement

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 22sec. f8 Jpg from camera ACROS simulation – 100% enlargement

You can read the book covers in both images, and the 100% scan of the film with the Imacon 848 is actually 7400px wide vs. the 6000px of the Xpro-2

At this point I will be curious to test a medium format digital camera (Fujifilm? Pentax? PhaseOne?) against a 4×5″ film.

In my mind I was sure a medium format film was superior to a 24MP aps-c camera regarding linear resolution. I was wrong.

On the next picture I went very high contrast, and again I noticed underexposure on the Fuji XPro-2. The details in the highlight disappear and the shadow become dark, closed. Using the RAW the highlights can be recovered and the dark tones opened up, but the JPG is kind of dark and high contrast compared to the film.

Hasellblad 500 c/m, 80mm f.28 – 2 sec f8 Fuji Acros 100

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 35mm f1.4 – 1sec f9 Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

I had the confirmation that the sensor sensibility was acting strange.

I reread the manual and found nothing useful but… the Dynamic Range settings. I was on Auto, not on a fixed setting. I will have to do some test with also the highlights compensation turned off. Basically I discovered I did not spend the right time to know the camera and test it. RTFM repeated to myself as a mantra… in this case the XPro-2 F manual not mine “Photography: The f Manual“!!

I turned the Dynamic Range to ISO100 and did some other tests, this time in a sunny day and using the Hasselblad 903 SWC, to have a situation similar to the pictures I took in the previous comparison with the Pentax 67 and the 45mm.

Hasselblad 903 SWC – 1/125 f8.5 – Fujifilm Acros 100

Fuji XPro-2 with 16mm f2.8 – 1/250 f9 – Jpg from camera with ACROS film simulation

Still in the digital version we have problems with the highlights and the shadows are a little dark, basically a lot of contrast, but now the medium grey area are exposed correctly. This happens also with the RAW. So I suppose that the Dynamic Range settings changes the ISO sensibility of the sensor, lowering it when there are high contrasts in the scene to try to preserve the highlights.

But, no matter what is done, the highlights always get burned, it’s a problem of the sensor saturation. Film is much more tolerant, and I have to say I love this tolerance.

Now with less contrast in the scene… all is perfect again.

Fujifilm XPro-2 with 14mm f2.8 – 1/250 f11 Jpg from camera ACROS simulation

Hasselblad 903 SWC – 1/125 f11 – Fujifilm Acros 100

If you want to see more pictures let me know and I will do a second part of this article and show the other pictures.

But this is enough for my non scientific conclusion.

• Medium format Acros film on Hasselblad has basically the same resolution of the XPro-2.
• The Fuji lenses are absolutely superb, at the level of Zeiss/Hasselblad!
• Digital sensors sucks in the highlights, even underexposing and recovering the shadows form the RAW file, still there is a sensor saturation that cuts and blows up the sun and similar highlights.
• The tones can be the same in digital and film, is a matter of settings.
• Fujifilm did an impressive job creating the ACROS film simulation.
• All the settings in the digital cameras are a pain in the neck (I wanted to be polite lol)

As personal consideration, I really love both results.
Film for me is simple and I dream of a digital camera without settings except for the ISO/aperture/shutter speed. Nothing more, no display, menus, dynamic range etc. Just a RAW on a memory card and nothing more. But I dream… I know!

I also noticed that, even doing a comparison, when I take the film camera in my hands I already know what I want to photograph, the almost exact point of view and camera settings, with digital I tend to find the picture in the viewfinder and at the end I take always more than one picture. I do not like the digital attitude and I cannot keep the film attitude with a digital camera in my hands. This is my problem, nobody forces me to not use the digital as a film camera!

As soon as I had the Hasselblad in my hands I felt at home for two reasons.
First of all the cameras were so simple, well designed and all similar so was easy to get used to them. With digital I spent the same years than I spent shooting film, but each brand and model is different, with different controls, different menus and too many things to remember. After the first reading of the Hasselblad manual I never opened it again, with digital I need the manual in the bag because every time there is something I do not remember, and yes, supposedly, I can setup the camera and use it as an analogue camera… but then I do not know why but something changes, can be a button pushed in the bag or while I take the camera out, but I had the image proportion changed, the level disappeared, the usual exposure compensation or the diopters correction. At least the ISO are easy on the XPro-2! I know many people hate that ISO dial, I love it!

The second reason is that I love the square format, I’m ok with a rectangular like the 4×5″ or 6x7cm, it is not too much rectangular, but the square is my preferred format. The 3:2 proportion of the 135 full frame or the Aps-C, it is too rectangular for me. It does not reflect my vision.
So, as soon as I took the Hasselblad, I felt connected again, the camera was just a natural extension of my eyes.

I would love to try some medium format digital, to compare it with a 4×5 film and to see if a less rectangular sensor will make me feel again more connected with the camera.

After this comparisons and using again my old working tools I decided how I want the digital camera of my dreams:

• Square format
• No LCD
• Only RAW files produced
• Nothing more than ISO/Aperture/Shutter settings
• In the viewfinder simply exposure data, a grid, the level and the histogram
• Diopter correction and compensation dials, if present, with a lock on them!
• No other settings, I want a sensor that will always have the ISO I choose and always responds in the same way
• A battery lasting at least 3 years!!!

Again, I know I’m dreaming… but dreams are free so why not?!

After this test I’m sure I will continue to use both digital and film. Film photography gives me the pleasure of the mental process, digital the easy “development”.

My next step, as soon as I will have the time, will be to test deeply the Fuji XPro-2 to understand the sensor limits and the effects of the settings also on the RAW format. I imagined that the RAW was not influenced by the various settings, it was my mistake.

All this said, I still love the XPro-2… just, as I said in a previous article… please let me deactivate all the buttons and the &#@%^#* compensation dial via firmware!!! Please Fuji… listen to me… that compensation dial is a pain!!!

Is Black and white better with digital or film? I compared the Fuji Acros film simulation on my XPro-2 with an Ilford FP4 film on my Pentax 67.

Lately I had the time to scan old negatives and I was pretty impressed by the quality and quantity of information available on film, so I decided to use film again, particularly for the PhoenixPhotoProject.
The quality of the images created was pretty impressive so I decided to try some film in medium format. I used to work with Hasselblad but I decided to get a used Pentax 67 and have some fun with it. Next time a Pentax vs Hasselblad comaparision!

I took some pictures on the snow in a sunny day. The dynamic range a the quality of the tones were great and I started to have the feeling that film can be better than digital sometime.

I decided to do a simple non scientific comparison and take the same pictures with the XPro-2, in RAW and jpg with the Acros simulation, and with the Pentax 67 with a roll of Ilford FP4.

The choice of a medium format film, compared to an APS-C digital is very simple, 24 MegaPixel is supposed to be equivalent as resolution to a medium format film ~100 ISO.

I measured the exposure with my beloved Minolta Spotmeter F set to the FP4 125 ISO, I then corrected 2/3 of a stop the shutter speed on the Fuji to compensate the 200 ISO base sensibility and used the same aperture.

The negative had been scanned with an Imacon 848 at maximum resolution (~6000x9000px) and downsized in Photoshop to the 4000×6000 pixels of the Fuji XPro-2. But you cannot see the full resolution here… I will figure out how to bypass the WordPress size limit, for now I will give the full size on request.

The only thing I did to the scan was to set the levels to have a complete histogram from pure black to pure white, no curves and no other corrections. In Photoshop I just checked the levels and cleaned some dust. Nothing more than what I always did in the darkroom choosing the exposure and paper contrast and using a little brush.

The point of the test for me was to see the differences with as less post-production as possible, both for the film and for the digital files.

Yes, I noticed, I have to clean the lens and CCD on the Imacon because two darker horizontal lines are visible in the sky… I’ll do it!!!

I know what someone will say so here some disclaimers:

• Yes, Acros digital to Acros film could have been better, but I had the Ilford in my fridge
• Yes, it is a scan so part of the process is digital
• Yes, you see it on the computer so you see it in digital
• Yes, to do a right comparison there is the need to compare prints, analogue and digital
• Yes, I do not intend to give absolute answers to all your questions
• Yes, one day I will rebuild my darkroom
• Yes, I will do some inkjet prints of both and compare them also if is not pure analogue process

For the blog I had to resize the images at 2500px maximum size that you can see clicking on the image. If you want to see the original size files, drop me an email from the contact page and I will give you a Dropbox link.

Pentax 67 with 45mm f4

For the first image I choose a very contrasted subject with the sun behind some tree branches. This is a subject that really stresses digital and, in fact film is quite superior.

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

The digital version is the jpg straight out of the camera. What is impressive is to see the 100% detail of the sun.

Pentax 67 45mm f4 – 100% crop

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

The tree branches are sure sharper in digital and there is less flare in the lens… but the sun is completely blown out and burns all the details in its area.

I consider this 1-0 Film vs Digital.

Something to notice is the difference in exposure. The XPro-2 always produces darker images than the film. I tested the camera meter with the Minolta Spotmeter and they measure the same, so I think in reality the sensor has a sensibility lower than declared. Since the limit of digital is in the highlights that makes sense, better to slightly underexpose than risk to overexpose the highlights.

I decided to take also a test for a less extreme light situation but with some great details to test the resolution. I took a pictre of the monument to the war victims of the Italian town of Boves. Yes… it is a very ugly monument I know… it was already horrible before they inserted that ugly vases you can see in all italian cities (probably produced by a politician with some power in perfect italian style ) but there was contrast and visible details and was easier than kidnap a person and force him/her to keep a visible newspaper!

Pentax 67 45mm f4 – Ilford FP4

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

Again the digital is darker than the film, but here is interesting to take a look at the details…

Pentax 67 45mm f4 – crop 100%

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

The difference is impressive and totally in favor of digital. I did not used a tripod but I’m pretty sure I was stable in both situations and the image is on focus in both situations. On the film, also at the maximum resolution is almost impossible to read the names.

I say for sure as sharpness Fuji Digital Acros vs Ilford F4 on Pentax 67 is 1-0

But I did some other test…

This is a picture of the PhoenixPhotoProject box. Very simple, on the balcony with direct sunlight.

Pentax 67 235mm f4 MACRO – Ilford FP4

Fuji XPro-2 55-200mm – RAW elaborated in CaptureOne 11

No much difference here, there is not an evident winner. The level of details is the same and the contrast difference is something that can depends simply on the levels.
As usual the digital is darker, and in this case I worked on the RAW file to make it more similar to the film.

Now the most impressive difference. The images are so different that I though I did something wrong, but checking my notes I did all right, simply I think the effect of the flare in the Pentax is what changes all.

Pentax 67 45mm f4 – Ilford FP4

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – RAW converted in CaptureOne 11

The last images show, probably, more the difference between modern and older lenses than the difference between the film and sensor.

Now some simple subjects…

Pentax 67 200mm f4 – Ilford FP4

Fuji XPro-2 55-200mm – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

Pentax 67 45mm f4 – Ilford FP4

Fuji XPro-2 14mm f2.8 – Jpg from camera ACROS film simulation

The Ilford FP4 was developed in Ilfotec HC 1+32 for 8 minutes as indicated for the FP4 exposed at the nominal 125 ISO.

Personally I like the more natural tones of the film and how well the highlights are managed but I also like the precision and sharpness of the Fuji XPro-2.

I’m writing the post while I’m listening at a Dexter Gordon vinyl, a special edition by Blue Note and I think I will never have the same feeling with a CD. I do not even consider mp3! But I also like the precision of the CDs, the separation of the instruments and the very crisp sounds.

In photography is the same, the round warmth of analogue versus the crisp precision of digital.

I like them both and since I left Canon to Fuji I really enjoy digital. Fujifilm managed to give natural colors and tonalities to digital and minimize the downside of the technology.

I will continue to use film and I will continue to use digital following my mood and the specific needs of different photographic projects.

What I like most of analogue photography is the slow pace involved in it. I like to use an external meter to evaluate the scene without looking in the viewfinder but pre-visualizing the image in my mind. I like the short time while I advance the film and the feeling under my fingers. I like to have to deal with no menus and no other things than aperture and shutter speed. I like the resistance of the manual focus lenses compared to the gummy feeling of  the focus on autofocus lenses (Fuji did a good job, better than Canon on this also… but still is not a mechanical medium format lens) and I like the heavy camera in my hands and the clack of the shutter and mirror.

With digital I get in digital mood, I shot too much and my eyes are always in the viewfinder (I love the OVF and if you want to know why check this article). I try to force myself to slow down but at the end I take always too many pictures.

It is the same with music, I like the big vinyl cover, the  time to take the disc out of it, clean it with the carbon fiber brush, put the stylus, wait for the click when it finds the groove and finally listen to the music in silence. My mind become focused 100% on the music.

Yes, I listen to mp3 on the computer while I work, but I’m not focused on the music, I just avoid the silence.

To conclude, I love my Fuji XPro-2 and I love film photography, I’m simply not a monogamous photographer!