Month: May 2012

Fuji X-Pro 1 Review – Good goods come in small packages

Post author By David
Post date May 24, 2012
3 Comments on Fuji X-Pro 1 Review – Good goods come in small packages

You can tell a lot by the camera you choose for a job. Late last week I had a shoot to do, and although my DSLR kit was sitting beside me, I reached for the Fujifilm X-Pro 1. I’m that impressed with the hip black slab.

So what is it about this camera that only sports an APS-C sized sensor, only has 3 lenses available and costs $1700 that makes it so endearing? This review breaks down my experiences with it, and shows some sample images. As with all my reviews, there’s no photographs of brick walls, no ISO tests with wine bottle labels or collections of kitchen items – just my impressions of using the thing in real-world situations, to shoot the real world.

All the images here were taken with the X-Pro 1. Most received minor contrast and definition adjustments to the JPGs in Aperture, and sharpening for the web. Except where stated, black and white conversions were done in Aperture. You can click on any of the image for a larger (1024px) version.

(This is a long review – you might want to eat it in chunks. Like an elephant.)

Moore Consulting Photography

Big in Rotterdam — one of my images ends up working in a Dutch kitchen

Post author By David
Post date May 3, 2012

I recently got an enquiry from a company in the Netherlands, looking to license one of my images to use in their new office kitchen.

As I mostly do commissions (for small businesses, non-profits and families) and some assignment work (for publications), stock enquiries like this are rare, and most of my images aren’t suitable for stock use.

But I have a few images posted, and they’d come across one of mine that they liked. Since they’re based in Rotterdam (one of the largest container ports in the world) and focus on trade with Asia, they were looking for an image of containers on an Evergreen shipping lines vessel.

A quick Google image search later, they’d found one of my images in my small stock library hosted as a quiet part of one of my sites.

They found it because I’d captioned and tagged the images accurately (and because there aren’t that many good Evergreen container ship images around apparently), and they got in touch and asked about fees to license the image.

We sorted out a price and I worked with them on a new version of the image that fit the exact proportion and size they needed.

They printed the file locally, and as you can see the image now adorns their hip-looking kitchen (thanks to Richard Vredenburg for the image).

I’m chuffed that there’s one of my images on the wall in an office in Rotterdam, and it’s amazing that this digitally-connected world allowed this small miracle to happen. Twenty years ago there is no way an image I took at the start of a family cruise could have ended up being looked by Dutch people making coffee, and now we take it for granted.

Here’s the original image (in its custom Rotterdam crop version):

Children's portraits Santa Fe

All Grown Up – a family session with older kids

Post author By David
Post date May 2, 2012

Most of the work I do for families involves young children, often between the ages of three and ten. But I also really like photographing older kids, so I was happy when Sonia from Sacramento contacted me and asked me about a session while her family were visiting Santa Fe.

Sonia’s son is already away at college, and her daughter is in high school. The last time they’d had family portraits taken was over ten years ago, and since it wouldn’t be too long before their daughter would leave the house, Sonia and husband Ken thought their trip would be a good opportunity to get some new images.