*** This Week Through Your Eyes 2023.09.02 ***

Such a fantastic shot - glad you didn't adjust the shutter speed... works great as it is!

Love the atmosphere in both of these and I admire your feeling for good composition and the well balanced processing!

Thanks.

The body is slightly bigger than the Z7, but not by much at all. The 35-70 f/4.5-5.6 lens is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the 24-70 f/2.8S, but then it is the most compact zoom in the system and only equates to a 28-55, so it doesn't have the reach of the 24-70 and is a bit limiting as it stands. In terms of weight, configured as shown in the picture, the Fuji is lighter than the Nikon at 1430g vs 1670g, but that is mostly lens in the case of the Nikon and mostly camera in the case of the Fuji (both of those are with L-brackets fitted).

To make the system more useful, I will need to add at least one more lens. I keep looking at the 100-200, which would cover 80-160(ish), giving me enough reach for most situations and wondering if that would satisfy my needs? But that still leaves a sizeable gap between that and the 35-70. Fuji do make a lens for that though, in the shape of the 45-100, but then I'd be carrying three lenses, two of which are pretty heavy, which starts to undermine the relatively compact form factor.

It's an interesting camera though, it feels good in the hand and is reasonably snappy considering the size of the files it's chucking around (lossless 16 bit raws come to around 130MB). The IBIS is excellent too, it's no E-M1 MKII in that department, but I'd judge it to be a bit better than the Z7 from my experience so far. To counter that though, you do lose a stop in aperture for the same depth of field, so my usual f/8 on the Nikon becomes f/11 on this, so great IBIS is kind of a necessity when hand holding it.

The handling of dynamic range is a bit quirky compared to what I'm used to. Where the Nikon has a bit of latitude at both ends of the histogram (more in the shadows, but some in the highllights), this has none in the highlights. If there's any bunching on the right histogram at all, those areas are not coming back. However, recovery from the depths of the shadows goes really deep and comes back very clean too, so it just needs to be treated a bit differently when exposing for a high contrast shot.

So, on the whole I happy with it. It's capable of truly excellent results and has some great features, but I get the impression it's only going to suit specific use cases such as woodland photography or short hikes, with my Z7 still being the go-to camera for longer hikes and where more reach is required.

I really like this one too, but maybe a tighter crop?

Wow - these are stunning.

It's a shame m4/3 never really continued down the small size path. That's why I quit. A camera like a weatherproof Pen-F would be great. Considering new camera kit is such sweet torment.

Thank you. But you give too much credit to me: I just fired up Silver Efex plugin, flipped though filters until found good enough to me and applied it :D

"I know my demons by name and sometimes they let me take portraits."

Yeah, a weather resistant Pen-F would be pretty sweet, as long as it had the focusing system of the E-M1 MKII, which was pretty great once they sorted out the firmware.

These are all superb. I love the colours.