The last entry was an attempt to not get too excited about the Fuji X-Pro 1, as I had literally only had it for a couple of days. Well, now I've had it for a couple more and it's getting progressively more difficult to not get excited about it. It's a blast to shoot, and it has some amazing tricks up its sleeve.

I decided to leave home early and go here and there to shoot before heading off to work. The first stop was a cafe just down the road from me, where a very friendly young dog lives. Her name is "raimu", pronounced more or less like "rhyme". I don't know the reason for this choice of name, though (waits while that one goes whistling over everyone's head). Anyway, she's a cute little thing so I wanted to take her picture with the Fuji. It's not the fastest autofocusing camera out there by a long shot, so I had to wait for raimu to be fairly still. This is not something the dog is very good at.

I managed to catch her while she was sitting by the window, and some great light was coming in:

From there, I got on the subway and headed for a fairly large temple in Nagoya. The temple's name is Nittaiji, and that's pretty much all I can tell you about it.

This is just inside the entrance. The plane was just lucky timing. I sharpened the picture but the colours are exactly what the camera recorded.

I don't know the correct name for this; it's where you go to purify yourself before entering the temple. I wanted to shoot this for two reasons. One was to get the bamboo spout in focus at F1.4 (which I did using the electronic viewfinder. It has a neat trick to zoom right in on a point to make sure you've got the focus). The other was to see how the X-Pro 1 handled the extremes of dark and light. It was incredibly bright today, and this "purification place thing" (told you I don't know what it's called) was in fairly dark shade. A lot to ask of any camera, and while the sky is pretty white, I don't think I've used another camera which could even get close to this.

As a matter of fact, there isn't really that much to shoot at Nittaiji. In front of the temple is basically just a big square which serves as a car park. The temple itself doesn't allow shooting inside. However, a couple of minutes away from the temple is a small garden-type place, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but it's very pretty and was going to be an interesting challenge to the X-Pro 1 because there were very bright places, very dark places, and places with both light and dark in close proximity.

As I mentioned before, the X-Pro 1 (like the X100 before it) has two viewfinders in one, an optical and an electronic. The electronic gives you an exact view of what you're shooting (like a DSLR with a 100 per cent viewfinder does), whereas the optical gives you a box which is basically the equivalent of a rangefinder's framelines and which acts as an approximation of what's going to be in your frame. If you're not worried about 100 per cent perfect framing accuracy, the optical viewfinder is your best bet. It's very similar to a rangefinder's finder in that you're looking directly through clear glass, so you can see as well as your eyes will let you. The shot above was taken with the optical, because I knew more or less what I would get and that was good enough in this case. The other thing about using the optical viewfinder is that it makes you shoot in a different way. A lot of photographers maintain that shooting with a rangefinder (or a camera which mimics the style of one, like the X-Pro 1 does in its optical viewfinder mode) gives rise to a slower, more considered style of composing and shooting, and I've found that this is generally the case.

The aim of this one was to get a good reflection in the water, while also having something to look at above the water (the plant on the right and the rocks). I added some extra sharpening, and zoomed in close it's pretty amazing how sharp it looks.

I wanted to get good focus on the leaves, with narrow depth of field and then I wanted to see how the camera handled the difference in brightness between foreground and background. I'm not complaining about the result.

This is where the electronic viewfinder was absolutely essential. I wanted to get the wooden bars sharp in focus and blur out the background (it's a little wooden hut with no entry permitted, but it looked nice). If I had used the optical viewfinder for this shot I would have been guessing at the composition, and because I was very close to the bars I would have been guessing AND trying to contend with parallax error. Much easier to use the evf, zoom in on the bars to get focus, and presto. This one looked great in black and white as well, to the extent that I couldn't choose one over the other, so I included both.

This was a good test for the camera's ability to handle dark and light. The greenery in the background was significantly brighter than the wood in the foreground. I think the X-Pro 1 did an excellent job here, although I did help it out in Lightroom as well.

More of the same. The plant in the front was very bright, and the structure in the back was pretty dark. Camera plus lightroom adjustments equals pretty nice shot to my eyes.

The colours are very nice here, and again the camera does a good job with the mix of dark and bright. 

Another reflection shot with something on top of the water as a reference point. I like the reflected reds.

Another case of darks and brights. The area in front of the bridge was significantly darker than the area behind, but again the camera seemed to take it in stride.

Here the idea was to get the rope very sharp (with correct focus and lightroom adjustment) and get a nice reflection in the lattice window.

Lastly, the 35mm 1.4 lens is not a dedicated macro (there is one, but I don't have it yet), but the camera does have a macro mode and you can get pretty close for a standard (non-macro) lens. The focus on this one is slightly off, but the colour was so nice that I had to give it a go.

More to come, thank you for looking. Feel free to leave comments.