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Pretty Good Hat

Eye-fi and more

I’m having a blast with this new camera, the Fuji X100S.

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I had a conversation with my wife today that seemed to bear on why this camera is so much fun. She’s looking for a new bike and has been demoing some from local shops to find just what she wants. (This, by the way, is where our little outdoorsy town excels; want a new mountain bike? Half a dozen excellent shops have gear for you. But if you want a camera, you can try your luck at the Best Buy, or drive 140 miles to the big city.) This morning she rode a bike that is on paper superior to the one she tried earlier in the week, with higher-specced components, insane suspension and a frame design that should be precisely in her wanna bike sweet spot.

But it wasn’t a much fun as the one the tried earlier. The experience of the first bike was just better, but not in a way she could quite explain or quantify. The ineffable sum of its parts just add up to more, and I guess that’s about the same with this fixed-lens, slightly slow to focus, battery-eating and sometimes just obtuse little Fuji. I still have the fancy glass if I ever want to upgrade to a new shiny DSLR body, but it simply feels good to sling the X100S over my shoulder and go for a walk, and I love the photos it makes.

I got an Eye-Fi card to use with it, to pull jpgs right off the card through the vapor while I’m away from my computer. It seems to work well, is not automatic (in the sense that I can turn it on and off and it requires the iPhone or receiving device to be set to its own wifi network to receive) but that’s probably better than something that’s unpredictable. The eye-fi adds imported photos to three locations: one, the in-app gallery; two, the iPhone camera album; three, an “eye-fi” gallery in photos app. This means that it’s a piece of cake to select jpgs in the camera roll and share to an icloud photo stream – meaning that those images are quickly available on my iPad, too (or, via shared photostream, anybody else’s I share with).

My flow is shooting with the X100S, doing in-camera development as desired to produce some jpgs, then turning on the eye-fi when ready to sync to the phone for sharing or (via Dropbox) taking a closer look on the iPad.

This is an out-and-about type of workflow, because I will still download and work with raw if/when I want more control or am not satisfied with jpgs. But it will be fun when traveling or enjoying busy days that keep me away from the laptop. And, because the photos get put in the camera roll, they also get uploaded to dropbox if its app is configured to upload from the camera roll. This latter effect may create some redundancy, but it’s also a nice and complete circle – out-of-camera images can easily be pushed everywhere I want to use jpgs.

A couple recent photos that I enjoyed:

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