A few years ago I went to Ise (home of the legendary shrine) with my better half. After seeing the shrine, we went a little further out to see the equally famous "Meoto-iwa", two rocks connected by a thick rope, said to represent marriage. They're a hugely popular spot with photographers, and when we got there, we were greeted by a large group of (mainly) retired men toting huge DSLR/lens combinations on very big tripods...and all standing in exactly the same place, or as close as the laws of physics would allow.

At that time I was shooting with the Leica M8 which is neither huge nor a DSLR, and rarely needs a tripod either. Firstly, there was no way I was going to get into their little circle, and secondly, I didn't want to anyway. What's the point of shooting the same thing that everyone else is shooting? I stood several meters away from them, more or less on my own, and my reward was one of my favourite pictures (even though it's noisy, not perfectly focused, slightly blurred and technically not very good, I still love it)

Wild seas, Meoto Iwa, Ise

Anyway, that was just my long winded way of saying that shooting the same thing everyone else does will give you the same picture that they have, unless you're exceptionally good.

Today was the Nagoya Festival, which is the biggest single festival-type event of the year. The main attraction is a parade which runs (well, crawls incredibly slowly) through the main road into the centre of the city, but there are events all over the place and they continue until dark and beyond that. To someone who's never seen it, the parade is probably pretty novel and interesting, but it hardly changes from year to year, and I've shot it several times before. So I went out with the express intention of shooting something related to the festival, but avoiding as far as possible the more obvious elements. I've also thrown in some entirely unrelated "street" shots because they were there and they were available.

I took out the Digilux 2 and a recently acquired Fuji X100 (I sold off the DSLR I used to shoot the boxing because unless I have something specific to shoot with it, it's a drag to carry around with a 70-300 lens on it...and by chance, the price I got for it was almost exactly the price of a used X100. Equal image quality, quite possibly superior in low light, and several times lighter. And because I am terribly shallow when it comes to cameras, it's also a very cool looking thing).

On to the pics. When I saw this riot of yellow, I figured it was time for the X100 to take centre stage. The Digilux has nice colours too, but the Fuji's are otherworldly.

One of the other features of the day is a large open market where crafts and various things are sold. This was also the X100, although the Digilux could have taken it too. They are both incredibly quiet cameras (the Digilux slightly more so than the X100), but the X100 has quicker autofocus for those "moments"

The great thing about having small, quiet cameras is that you can get close to people and shoot without giving the game away. In any normal environment with a normal level of sound, it is essentially impossible to hear either the Digilux or the X100 from even a few feet away unless you know exactly what you're listening for and you have better hearing than an owl.

I didn't even try to count the cameras that were out on the streets today. I'd bet good money that at least half the people I saw were carrying one.

This couple were waiting for the parade to pass by. I just thought their "his and hers" headgear was too awesome not to shoot. This was the Digilux, because I wanted to stand back a bit and shoot it at 90mm...without a chance of being heard.

Best viewpoint: on Dad's shoulders. Again, Digilux 2 for the zoom capability.

This had precisely nothing to do with the parade, but I thought it was too cool not to include

Later, it got dark and that meant putting the Digilux 2 away (for all that it produces lovely stuff during daylight, its top ISO is 400 and even at that level it's unacceptably noisy most of the time). Darkness means the X100 takes over, and it really showed what it's made of here. Everything from here on was at ISO 4000 or over with a little (and I mean a little) noise reduction from Lightroom.

Two bonus pictures, totally unconnected to the festival, just because I like them. I couldn't resist the patterns here:

And this one really shows the Fuji approach to colour. This is with a very slight boost to saturation and with some shadow detail added, but otherwise this is pretty much what the camera recorded.

Thanks for looking!