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.