30 Days with the Fuji X-Pro3: Day 2

I mentioned yesterday that the Fuji X-Pro3 is more about emotion than technical precision, and I want to expand on that some more with today’s post. As technology gets better and better, we’ve been treated with cameras that are stunningly precise. Modern lenses are increasingly sharp, accurate with their color renderings, and free of imperfections such as chromatic aberration. Modern digital cameras can do wonders like take acceptably noise-free images at absurd ISOs, burst shoot 11+ frames per second, track a toddler with continuous eye autofocus, and so forth. I’m a big fan of technology and think these advancements are amazing! But I also think that they can, if unchecked, transform your photography from being about the moment to being about the technology.

I don’t know how to phrase this without getting too hand-wavey…but maybe this sort of thing just has to be hand-wavey. Art is never able to be fully dissected. The techniques can be analyzed and understood, but there’s always a je ne sais quoi to good art that you can’t quite wrap your mind around. Or maybe you can…but you’d rather not spoil the moment by getting academic.

In many ways, the Fuji X-Pro3 is just another modern camera. It’s super fast, has great autofocus, can take video, etc. etc. etc. But its design strongly encourages a balance between the modern technical precision and the moment. I’m sure I’ll talk more about this in future posts, but for now the reason I want to mention it is that the image I picked for day 2 is wonderfully imprecise. It’s the sort of photo you take when you’ve been stuck in quasi-isolation for 9 months and are taking wacky pictures of everyday objects to entertain yourself. This is a high-ISO, grainy, completely out of focus shot…all of those are supposed flaws that we usually try to avoid as photographers. Yet if I had taken a technically precise photo of this scene, it would be unbearably boring. To me, this is far more fun.