Daily Inspiration #354 by Ryan Lussier

Hi Steve,

Long time reader and I love you site!!!! It has helped me so much since starting this obsession called photography. I am a relative newbie and found your site and have been hooked ever since. It was my dream to own a Leica since following you but I decided to go with Fuji instead and started off with the x100 and then purchased the X pro 1 and all it’s lenses when it came out. I’ve since purchased a Fuji Klasse S point and shoot film camera and have been experimenting with film and I love it thanks to Ibraar Hussain’s posts.

I live in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada and it’s not the most beautiful part of Canada to find yourself in. I recently visited a place in my city that I had no idea was there, the oldest running train in North America. The Prairie Dog Central Railway has been running a steam engine locomotive built-in 1882, the train was really cool and the ride down the prairies track was awesome but to me what made this trip special is some of the amazing volunteers that run the train. I’ve always been drawn to environmental portraits and I love what you’ve written about the 35mm focal length, there is just something about it. My X pro 1 is in the shop getting a sensor cleaning so I was shooting with the x100 and most of these shots are straight out of the camera jpegs with very little done to them. I don’t know if these are good enough for your site as I’m really a newbie but I thought I’d send it in to share it with you anyways. In addition I didn’t know which ones were the best as I’ve never had anyone critique my photography before so I kind of broke your 3 shot rule sorry. Even if they don’t make it in if you have the time I would love to know what I can do better.

All the best your fan

Ryan Lussier.

31 Comments

  1. I especially like #2 and #3 , you have a good eye , the more you shoot the more it will improve. Hope to see more of your work on thos site.

  2. Hi Ryan

    Us i understanded you made this pictures with your X100. I love the way you captured sharp/unsharp sections and i like so much the colors. This is really a nice camera/sensor/lens combination.
    This described water color painting doesn’t disturb me on these pictures and may be an effect of the unsharp section.

    for picture critique:
    P1: very nice colors and sharp/unsharp sections, but I would prefer that you go down with your knees so that this person in front is a bit longer and give him more authority. Next effect would be if you do that, also to look a little bit more upwards with the camera so that the left part of the picture shows no underground of the train. Effect is also, that the person is more up in the picture, not in the center.

    P2: Nice colors again, but a little camera shake.

    P3: Golden light is really nice as a reflection in the train. Normally this effect would continue till to the locomotive in front, but it’s surface on that height is broken. If you had a higher position (what was not possible there, I suspect) then you could had the chance to search for this golden light in the locomotive.

    Photography is always a compromise and sometimes we don’t have this luck to compose as we like. You have been there with your camera and it is always easy to give critique to the final picture after.
    So my favorite of this 3 pictures is no. 1 .

    Keep on to try out your cameras, especially the G2 and it’s lenses are really nice. Problem i see is – where you find all the time to use all your cameras…
    I am more the type to concentrate on one system.

    Greets, Daniel

  3. Hi Lee,

    Yes the Lightroom conversion of RAW X Pro 1 shots in my opinion totally suck. But that doesn’t mean it will stay this way forever. Silkypix although a pretty unfriendly app does handle the RAW files very well. There is also good support from Raw Photo Processor which I like a lot. There has been a lot of interesting info about RAW converters and X Pro 1 files here..http://chromasoft.blogspot.ca/
    And I find the best way to keep informed about Xpro1 stuff is through the scoop it page here..http://www.scoop.it/t/fuji-x-pro1
    One final note what I love about fuji is the jpeg’s this camera produces are amazing and well worth the struggle and wait for proper raw support in my humble opinion. Good luck on your decision.

    • Apparently there’s another lee in the house LOL. Glad to hear out from you Ryan. I did read from chromasoft but I’m struggled to understand it because the review is really deep in technical terms(which is VERY helpful for someone who wants to dig deep), that requires me to open a literature about sensor manufacture and the magic stuff about it, which really isn’t my background at all :D. Totally agree about the scoop Ryan, it looks like a dedicated web for the x-pro1.

      Anyway, I hope LR does come with a better version.

      Thank you very much Ryan.Happy shootin 😀

      Cheers

  4. EXTRA! I also found this blog of a japanese guy http://photo.yodobashi.com/fujix/gallery/index.html, he is also shooting with the X-Pro1 and I also found this water color painting effect.
    for example in this image http://photo.yodobashi.com/fujix/img/gallery/xpro1_26b.jpg
    if you look closely to the roof of the house, the colors look strange, as if it’s not the real material of the roof.

    Actually I’m not a pixel peeper but if my photo looks like a water color painting, I would be very alarmed about it(unless I intend to apply the water color effect).

    I hope Steve, Ryan and the others could help me out here cause I want to buy the X-Pro1 but also confuse about the OM-D presence also I do not want a DSLR, yet I want to invest in a mirrorless system that is solid.

    Thank you very much

    • To quote a gentleman named Joakim in another forum in regards to the X=Pro1’s water color effect,

      “Well, it’s fairly simple… It’s not really Fujifilm “doing” anything, it’s a byproduct of the type of interpolation you HAVE to use to get a usable image out of a X-Pro raw…

      The images have low noise, due to two main reasons:
      1) the “green” raw channel has more coverage but less positional symmetry than in a Bayer sensor – and it’s fairly well balanced against CIE Y.
      1a) as a biproduct, you get less high-frequency luma “miscalculations” in the interpolation, giving lower added raw converter noise

      2) the fairly large B-B and R-R interdistances necessitates a fairly large chroma smoothing radius, unless you go to algorithms like POCS and such – which are very computationally heavy.

      The camera doesn’t “add” croma smoothing, it’s there in the principle.

      I would however think that the samples seen here exaggerates the bad parts of teh effect, much better results would be possible with an algorithm like POCS or anything else better adapted to uneven channel coverage.

      The Fujifilm principle will in any case never get better than 50% of the Bayer chroma resolution, an inherent property of the scheme.
      At higher ISOs this turns into an advantage in stead of a disadvantage. “

  5. Hello Ryan, have you found any problem when you convert and post processed your landscape RAW pictures with the X-Pro1? Did you find the smearing effect or water color painting effect in its original size?

    Thanx Ryan 😀

  6. Nice shots sir. That second one might have benefited from a little fill flash. Would have made the guy ‘pop’ and would not have taken too much from the background. The flash on the X100 really is a clever little sod.

  7. Well done Ryan! Good use of the available light indeed. Happy shooting 🙂

  8. Thanks everyone for the feedback and the suggestions, I am so happy that this made it on to Steve’s site. Thanks Steve!!!! I really appreciate the kind words everyone and I can’t wait to do another project to submit. For those that are interested I uploaded some more photos on my very limited flickr page, you can check it out here.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanalussier/sets/72157630008416207/

    Ibraar thanks for the kind words, I came across a really great deal on a G2 and the 21, 28, 45 and 90 and just had to get it I can’t wait to try it out.

    Thanks again everyone.

  9. Great Shots, Ryan . BTW Winnipeg is a very special place to me , just love it .

  10. Really enjoyed this series Ryan, and would loved to have seen more, as I do love the romance of vintage Railways (I work on the Railways myself though aint a Train Spotter! :))
    And you honour me with your mention! Thanks man!

  11. Hi Ryan,

    Some really good use of light in the last two shots, my favourite is the last one as it has both the late light of the day an d th embody darkness of the approaching evening. Good work and I hope to see some film shots soon.

  12. It’s all about the light.
    #1 looks like a cloudy day with crappy light so you used depth of field really well to draw attention to the subject (the person)
    #2 has beautiful light and color in the sky and on the train but that makes the person look too dark and thus distracting.
    #3 It would have been great if that golden sunset was also hittting the engine as the engine is the subject.

    (Not that I’m at all qualified for critique but you did ask!)

    Very nice photos and worthy of a post here!

  13. Good work. Second one is my favorite.
    Let’s see some more of your work.
    Thanks for sharing.

  14. Who says Winnipeg isn’t beautiful? You’ve just demonstrated it is. For a “newbie,” you are certainly very talented. Would love if you could share your EXIF settings, colour settings, etc. Nicely done!

    • Thanks Duane that train is amazing and really quite a testament to quality of old world craftmanship still running after all these years.

    • Thanks Greg a G2 with 4 lenses are on it’s way should be here soon. I have learned that I hate film scanning though =)

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