The last time I picked up my Fuji X-Pro 2 was to take some headshots of myself for a series of whitepapers I’m authoring as part of my day job. Purely pragmatic, given that the first was due for review the very next day as a draft, and I still had my studio equipment from when I shot semi-professionally some 10 years ago. The images were good and well-lit, but I didn’t really feel anything besides completing a job on a ever-growing to-do list.
In May, a close friend of mine asked if I fancied doing a sports car road trip with him and another friend through Europe. France, Italy, Switzerland, we’ll go where the road takes us in those countries. “Great!”, I gleefully exclaimed, thinking that I could put the 4x new PS4S tyres I just fitted to the Porsche to great use on some mountain passes in the Alps. Thinking pragmatically, I also thought I had some already decent camera gear that I could use to take some great video footage of some of the passes to share with friends. Armed with these dangerous thoughts, I set an additional budget of £1,000 to bolster the equipment in my bag.
Through clever hunting of deals at retailers, used marketplaces and auctions, I managed to secure the following:
- Fujifilm XF WR 16-55 f/2.8 Zoom Lens
- Tascam DR40 Audio Recorder
- GoPro Hero 8 Black
- Lowepro PhotoActive BP300 (great for hiking with might I add)
- A few spare batteries for the Fuji
- Some 3rd party GoPro mounts to use on the car
- Jobi Shotgun Mic
- A good few Samsung 256GB SD cards
- An assortment of USB Type-C power supplies for the car
- A 1TB External USB-C SSD (DIY for £52 thanks to Amazon!)
Buying second hand is a great idea if you’re using this equipment for a potential one-off trip and you’re unsure if you’re going to use it again, as you can typically sell the kit for the exact figure you paid for it, and not fall victim to depreciation.
In addition to this, I also packed:
- Jessops Carbon Fibre tripod with Manfrotto 464 head
- GoPro Hero 5 Session
- Fujifilm X-Pro 2 (clearly)
- Fujifilm XF 35mm 1.4 prime lens
One might observe I ended up buying more stuff than what I was originally intending to take, and that’s usually the case when I get these dangerous ideas. However, for £1k, the amount of capability I added to my bag was enormous. I haven’t had a photojournalist’s zoom lens since I last had a Nikon system, which I sold in 2014. I’ve never had a professional-grade sound recording solution, which is ironic given that I occasionally freelance as a theatre sound engineer (more so out of enjoyment for the skill). A 4k capable GoPro with stabilisation was absolutely crucial to getting smooth footage up the hills without the use of a roll cage (like I get away with in the TVR). Lastly, the 1TB SSD ended up being too small to really work with, as I ingested approx 800GB of media from two weeks of being away!
So the buying kit bit and getting a good deal is a little bit fun, but the really fun part is playing with it. As soon as I got to our first stop – Aix-les-Bains in France – I had the X-Pro 2 out equipped with the 16-55mm f/2.8. My initial impression was how refreshing it was to have a wide-angle lens again, given that my style of photography has traditionally taken advantage of the distortion wide angle lenses offer to compose the shapes in my images. I wasn’t spending as much time trying to “work the shot” like I normally would with the 35mm f/1.4 prime. Given that high ISO performance is reasonably good on cameras these days compared to when I first picked up a Canon EOS 350D as a kid, I wasn’t particularly missing the fast aperture of the 35mm f/1.4 prime. Suddenly, the flexibility offered by the 16-55mm f/2.8 and the familiarity of the X-Pro 2’s ergonomics – like an old friend – meant I was no longer thinking about using the camera, but just enjoying playing with compositions in my viewfinder.
The urge to tell the stories of the places I was visiting, the people, the ways of life, all naturally came back to me. My fingertips began to control the camera eloquently and precisely. It was a process I hadn’t felt since the startup company part of my career sucked my life away – and suddenly I felt like I was just completely unhindered. I felt like a photojournalist again.
Whilst I subscribe to Chase Jarvis’ motto of “the best camera that you have is the one that’s with you”, I find it more of a motivational piece to prove that you can take good pictures with something like your phone camera. Which I did, some of my series of this trip involved my iPhone. However, I am absolutely willing to admit that life is far easier if your style involves certain compositional elements, having the flexibility of proper kit is far easier and allows you to “work the shot” (something I learned from a portraiture workshop years ago, and I think perhaps a Gary Fong tip?). I think it was this very technique combined with the ability to play with compression distortion from the 16-55mm f/2.8 that flicked this switch in my brain. To summarise, I think there’s a fine balance to be had interpreting Chase’s statement. Lack of equipment doesn’t prevent you from telling a story and making highly effective compositions, but it can sometimes be creatively stifling if you cannot easily work your shot.
Walking around the Swiss Alps reminded me of the techniques employed by the world renowned filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, namely the use of front projection in scenes like his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The depth of the vistas allowed me to play with incorporating some of the foreground in the landscape as the subject of my story, which you’ll see as a common theme in my rural Switzerland series.
The flexibility of having 55mm at the top end of the new lens (75mm-ish equivalent in 35mm/full frame lingo) inspired me to play with some scenic portraits, trying to play with a bit of graphic weight and abuse the rule of thirds.
Below is a series of images from this year’s journey through rural Switzerland. I sincerely hope you get as much enjoyment from watching this video as I did trying to tell the stories of the charming towns of Grindelwald, Evoléne and Interlaken, and their prominence with the incredible, historic and stunning trails of the Swiss Alps.
To finish, I think I’ve fell in love with photography again. There’ll be more I share as I finish processing the images from my road trip. Next on my list is to try and experiment with longer focal lengths on my trail walks, to see if I can get more inventive with combining my use of compression with my abuse of graphic weight…
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