Some say you have to spend thousands of Euros to get quality action shots. They say you need a 1DX, a D5 or at least a 7DmkII with an ultrafast 70-200 f 2.8 to get what you want. Advertisings claim, we need predictive 4D AF-tracking, 12 frames per second, 200 shots of buffer, ultra high speed flash sync, pocketwizards and other bells and whistles to get a decent photo. And - that's what they don't say - at last seven grand to spend. A few years ago I stupidly believed them. I bought the 70-200 f2.8s, the brickheavy "pro" bodies and was rather pleased with the results and feeling "pro". But times have changed. Along came the knowledge that I neither want to bring that massive gear nor I want to spend the money on it. It just felt not right anymore. (Read more in my article about getting rid of your SLR-gear...)
So today I want to tell you the story behind these photographs, taken with a very different approach: use what you have and know how to use it.
Being a teacher and living in the bavarian alps, my students and I took one day off to go skiing. We went on a small hill, literally behind the schoolyard to where we could walk and didn't have to pay anything for the ski-lift. (And yes, we are the privileged in these kind of activities...)
The children started to build a little kicker and began jumping. After I saw the first airs and my concerns about ending up in hospital had gone, I relaxed and watched the sun rising behind the Kaisergebirge, a mountain ridge between Bavaria, Germany and Tyrol, Austria. I anticipated beautiful sunstars with a high f-stop and looked for something interesting to put in the foreground, assuming to take a landscape shot for the school's website. Meanwhile the boys and girls kept flying in front of my lens, so the foreground problem solved iteself.
Taking the pictures then was quite straight forward and none of the ever so importand tech-specs I needed or even missed. Even if I had have them, I didn't use them. (Ok, a little more frames per second would have been nice, but that's the only thing, I promise!) I stopped down to f16 because I wanted sunstars. Definitely no need for a f2.8 glass. I put the X-A1 in manual focus because of the distance to the action beeing rather the same all the time and depht of field was more than enough at f16. No need for ultrafast AF as well. Due to constant lighting I went with manual exposure too. Shutter was set at 1/1500th to freeze the action, especially to stop the quickly moving snow-particles. Although it was very bright, I had to go up to ISO 3200 to get two stops of overexposure according to the metering, which is not a problem at all with the X-A1. At drive set to high with 5.6 frames per second, I held the trigger and of it went. Velvia simulation was my way to go, because the kids love that oversaturated, punchy look they know from skiing magazines. Highlights were set to -1, noise reduction -1, colour +1 to get an even more mountain magazine look. To emphasize speed and power, a student took a shovel and threw a load of snow between me and the riders - getting this timing right, was by the way the most difficult part of the shooting.
Now, could a "pro" camera / lens combination have done better? Camerawise, lenswise, really? I don't know. Maybe a pro photographer with more time, "pro"-riders, a "pro"-location, a "pro"-helicopter to get there and some dedicated postprocessing (I did none, except in camera cropping) would have gotten this from 85 percent of the possible to 98 percent. This all in all, was a lot of fun, no effort with very pleasing results. Fuji, yes I love you!

So what's the point? First of all I want to remind us as photographers, that creativity should not be limited by the gear we own. It is worth thinking about what our gear can do, not what other gear could do. Most of the time it is not about the gear, it is about us using it. Furthermore it is worth to have a critical look on the advertising. Most of the example pictures that we are shown to demonstrate the advantages of the latest features could have been taken with worse equipment as well.

As you can clearly see by the number of essays posted on this page, I really do not tend to "blog" my so very important life to the world. Maybe the reason is that I think in times of global warming and global terror, streams of refugees all over europe and soforth there are by far major problems to think about than my last holiday to France (which by the way was great). But after all, photography still is important to me and today a camera arrived that drew my attention: the Sony a 6000. Of course by the time of early 2016 this is not the hottest and latest release of camera gear, but it took some time to feel the need of upgrading from the really loved X-A1. You all might know the relevant competitors in this segment, so I can leave that out. I wanted to give the a 6000 a chance because it is said to have all the things that miss in the X-A1. Very fast AF, eye AF, reliable tracking when recording video. Today it arrived from amazon for around 550 € with the kit lens 16-50 anything...

The excitement was enourmous when the postman brought it. Just similar to the day I got the X-A1 I again was in charge of the kids, but it was already evening. So we prepared dinner and the girls wanted to have some of the potatoe soup. Again I didn't have time to read the manual and to be honest, I didn't want to read it. So battery in, SD card and pressed the shutter, played a little around and now it's a few hours later. Conclusion? I stay with the Fuji.

Everything they say about the Sony a 6000 seems to be true. Nice face tracking in video, very accurate AF for video, very smooth working AF for video and so on. Also it feels quite snappy when focusing low contrast very bright or very dark scenes. Everything is true. And I so dearly wish, that Fuji will be able to do that soon.

But, there is a thing that they don't tell you and that is for me quite a point: the final (still) image quality is comparatively poor. This for me is the main aspect of a stills camera so it is a substantial argument. And, if Sony's battery draining "pre-AF" (the camera pre-focusses all the time an thus keeping the probable focus target in focus all the time) is turned of, it isn't that much of a difference between the X-A1 (known for the "poor" focusing) against the "world's fastest AF on the Sony.

But back to final image quality. What do you get on the jpeg? (I hope we all agree that spending hours in lightroom is an overcome approach to photography.) From the Sony nothing special. From the Fuji all that we love: beautiful colours and an over all pleasing image.

Really, the situation was not of interest, neither the pictures from a photographic point of view. But have a look and think, and look and rethink and stay with Fuji. Old love.

See the beautiful colours? Skin tone, tonal reception of the whites, differences in the whites from the bowl and the shirt? Great!

Everybody knows, that having children is the one of the more challenging aspects of being a photographer for many different reasons. You might not have that much time to spend behind your high end camera and in front of your well calibrated EIZOs, you might not have that much time diving into the latest technical details of lightroom algorithms and camera features. Instead you have to conserve both, energy and time, without wanting to neglect photography completely. So you somehow have to be the "fathergrapher". That means also that it is not longer a very good idea to load the trolley's trunk full of 2.8 glass or occupy the precious space in the family car with the rest of the ever so essential camera gear. Instead of hiking up the lowepro trekker, now your job is to get the toddler in his palanquin-style child carrier uphill. Or you stay at home and get completely nuts. You get the point. Reduction is necessary, but where to start?

As having used to use Canon SLRs, my thoughts first were about getting a small DSLR body. Then I thought of a small DSLR body with an - after a fashion - walk around lens from my stock and came to the 24-105 f4 L. Less than a 1D body, but more than I wanted to carry and still the quite heavy lens. Buying one of those consumer grade lenses and their poor optical quality was also not the way to go. The field of the mirrorless systems came in my viewfinder and I considered the EOS M as a way to go. Still with the L glass a heavy load and a lot of cons in usability, mainly auto focus issues, lack of in camera RAW conversion, etc.

After having read various reviews and spending some time getting back to the old pixel peeping days when digital imaging started for me, I stumbled upon Fuji's rangefinder style cameras. Lightweight, fully equipped with the latest electronic gadgets and reasonably priced. I didn't know if I would ever be happy with something other then my beloved Canon gear and I didn't want to waste too much money on something, that might end up laying in the shelf. By chance I got my hands on the X-A1 and for the bargain price of just 200 € I took the chance and bought a very little used one with the FUJINON XC16-50mm f 3.5-5.6 OIS from a fellow photographer. And what a surprise! How can an APS-C camera be so small, so lightweight?

Of course, the afternoon I finally got it, I was in charge of entertaining the children rather then sitting down, reading the manual, fiddling around with controls and dials. So I took it with us, put it into portrait mode (what I had never done on my canons, because neither precise focusing shooting one handed not using the viewfinder nor one handed operation was sufficiently possible) and off it went.

I can not express what a surprise it was in terms of the quality of the jpeg's taken this afternoon or the amazing handling quality of this camera. Here you can find a few of the taken images as they came just out of camera. Absolutely no post-processing was done to them, not even cropping. With a little more knowledge about the operation and the use of more sophisticated IN CAMERA raw conversion, you could even get better results like this one:

Would this have been possible to to with my conventional DSLR gear in such ease of use without even touching a PC? Unfortunately the answer is no way.