Welshot Focus - Issue 3 - October 2017

poor but I got enough. Shooting from a lower viewpoint has
the advantage that you are looking up so there’s the chance
of capturing peoples’ faces. Come late afternoon, the rain
was so torrential that the usually busy streets of Lisbon were
empty of people and the poor light was making life a struggle
too. I’m happy to shoot at ISO 1600 and beyond on the X-T2
but with the gathering gloom, the lack of victims and my
unpleasantly damp trousers, I decide it is vino o’clock and
head back to the hotel.
Any morale to this tale? Yes, giving yourself as many chances
to use your camera is very much a good thing, whether that
is a city break or a little project. It will keep you enthused and
your pictures will only get better.
Above: Shot with the Fujifilm X-T2 with 56mm f/1.2 and 50-140mm f/2.8 lenses. My people shots were processed through Lightroom, then
Anthropics Portrait Professional and DXO FilmPack 5.
The tram, graffiti and nice side-lighting had potential. Better still, there was not a soul around. Fifteen minutes of waiting, trams on the
way, lovely. Tram gets to the right spot, behatted idiot and random tourists walk into shot. Doh!
Below: Shoot from chest-level means you get the chance of catching peoples’ faces as you are looking at. I relied on the camera’s
exposure and autofocus systems, and these shots were converted to mono using Google Nik’s Silver FX software.
with the weather than me. I had a waterproof jacket but didn’t
pack matching trousers which was a beginner’s mistake. The
camera, a weather-resistant Fujifilm X-T2, fared better than
me working fine all day without missing a beat. The camera
stopped autofocusing for a few minutes in the evening
and that was sorted with a lens swap, and there was some
condensation in the viewfinder eyepiece the next morning but
that soon went.
I shot my brolly snaps on three lenses, the 16mm f/1.4, 35mm
f/1.4 and 50-140mm f/2.8, only the latter being weather
resistant. The biggest challenge was keeping the lens front
water droplet free and the micro-fibre cloth from the local
outdoor shop helped here.
With its silent electronic shutter I could shoot at 14 frames
per second, which I did regularly trying to catch the decisive
moment. How Henri Cartier-Bresson did it with a manual
focus Leica wrapped up in his hankie and a couple of rolls
of film in his pocket, I’ll never know but that is why he is the
master.
Having the ability to shoot so many pictures very quickly is
a boon, but it comes at a price. One, it takes up memory, on
your camera’s card and on your hard drive back home, and
two, you have to at some point go through all your shots. On
the first point, with today’s large capacity cards there is no
excuse not to have enough memory for still shooting – shoot
hours of 4k video and that’s a different story. Many of you will
recall when a 1GB CompactFlash card cost around £1000 –
or £1 for a MB. Now £20 buys you a 64GB SD card - that is
0.03p per MB. I encourage people not to edit or chimp shots
until you are in a front of your computer and with large cards
there is absolutely no need to. Back home is when to look at,
rate and delete shots. I use Lightroom which is my preferred
workflow solution. Good firm editing to get rid of shots you
will never, ever use is important to save hard drive space.
Meanwhile, back in the pouring rain, I am stalking (obsessing!)
any photogenic brolly. I don't like brollies with branding logos
and those in Lisbon suited me very well. Much of the time
I shot with the camera at chest level, sometimes using the
camera’s tiltable monitor but mostly by pointing and shooting.
The hit rate with the latter technique was, as you'd expect,
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