On November the 24th, 2022, I traveled from my hometown to Amsterdam to pick up my "first" camera: the Fujifilm X100s.

I've owned cameras before, but I wasn't shooting with them as much. The Samsung dv300f was a compact digital camera that was released in 2012. I got it from my dad, but besides it being a camera to test things out and play around a little, I didn't really use it all that much. The quality of the pictures were not the greatest, and as I was a bit younger when I used them back in the day, I didn't take it all too seriously.

Things changed around the end of middle school, age 16-17. I had started taking more photos for fun with my phone (Samsung SM-A520F), and started to enjoy doing it. Here are some photos I made from a trip to Indonesia (not all of them, sorry :P).
Around 2019, I bought the OnePlus 6T after the funeral for my old Samsung phone.

The OnePlus, despite having a great physical camera, had trash camera software, but I figured that out later on. From the beginning I Went with the stock application and settings, played around a bit, and eventually turned to the Google Camera app, or GCam, which helped me take better pictures without too much color distortion, better light calculations, and more.

Finally coming to the main part: My new addition, the Fujifilm X100s. As I mentioned in the beginning, I bought this camera not too long ago from a kind stranger in Amsterdam. I was getting tired of photography through my phone, and wanted something that would motivate me more, while I could learn about the basics of photography. The guy I bought the camera from highly suggested I started shooting in black-and-white before I'd play with camera recipes and such.

After shooting colored pictures all my life, it was kinda hard shooting in black-and-white. Shooting with a black-and-white vision decreases the overall details that I can see. The biggest hurdle I had to get over was discovering the right balance of light. It's a great way to practice other key functions of photography by experimenting with the aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It took me a bit to get used to, but now I don't want to shoot in something else for the time being.
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Taking photos like this has become easier, and has allowed me to look for photo material, landscapes or scenery in a different way.
I'll show you what I mean.

The process

The first thing that I'm looking for isn't focus, but the amount of light is in my picture. In the example below, I use the shadow on the car to determine how bright my picture should be. Of course, it'll depend on the use case and how you'd want you photo to look like, but in my case, I wanted to bring out the front of the car, while still having enough detail in the back.

It's alright if you over-expose your shots. I'd rather over-expose than under-expose, because I can still adjust the exposure within a photo editor program.

Speaking of editing! As this shot was done fairly alright, the editing I had to do was minimal. Something happened with downloading, so some of my metadata was gone in a couple of my photos in my online album. I can say here that I used the supported Fujifilm Tele Conversion Lens, with pretty low ISO, and equal exposure settings. Pretty proud of this one.

Here's another one!
The picture on the left is the developed version of the image. The right one is a .JPEG version of how I see it through my viewfinder. The sun had almost fully set in the back, so there was less light/shadow reference I could use. To combat this, I used a greater aperture and/or change in ISO settings. It solely depends on your surroundings. As I said before, as long as the picture is not under-exposed, the outcome wouldn't be too bad :)

The last one I have is from a shack on abandoned farmland. Notice the light on the wall on the right. As I'm going for the inside of the shack, it's alright that the outside is a bit over-exposed. After all, that's not what I'm focusing on.

And, after a bit of tweaking, I managed to keep part of the details in the back.
Awesome! ヾ(•ω•`)o

Conclusion

Well, that's as far as I'm willing to go for now. I just started this deep-dive, and there's a lot more to learn. For those who are interested, I'll continue to update my progress on my online album, and I have an Instagram account for those that like to use it.
Who knows, I might even write more about stuff like this in the future.

Shiruvaaa (@shiruvaaa) • Instagram

A last image to close it off, because I really like this one!
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