A minor disaster

Minor disaster: It turns out that I have left the charger for the batteries for my 5D3 at home in England and so I have five weeks with ‘only’ my DP2M and X100! It’s very annoying but not that much of an issue, when I return from India I will take my complete DSLR kit with me to France and leave it there I think, I’ll just use the compacts for travel from now on, yes that’s right, I’m already that confident.

My Pro photographer mate James Barke is coming to stay with me this weekend, he is en route from Kerala to Bangkok and is packing a Nex 7 instead of his usual DSLR kit so we will have a ‘compact’ excursion up into the Western Ghats, I’m going to be interested in the comparisons we come up with over a curry or two….. The weather here is just fantastic at the moment albeit rather hazy, but I am certainly not complaining!

Now I’m going to have a slight moan about the Fuji X100..  She is my darling and I love her to bits, and she has taken some fabulous pictures.  She has enabled this firstly by being ‘to hand’ almost instantly and also by making files of wonderful quality.  However….. I was doing some ‘airport’ photography in Gatwick North terminal on my way out here and , yes, the light is not great and so I was using ISO 1600 which on my 5D3 really is like ISO 400 was a few years back. Not so the X100, the files were grainy as fuck and the only way I could clean ‘em up was to use so much noise reduction that they became smeary messes. I was not expecting miracles, but this result was not so amazing. Oh yes and I tried the flash which I had read was surprisingly powerful. Not so.

There: Moan over, I still love her and I know I shall take some great photographs with her, I’ve just come to the edge of the envelope , is all….

The DP2M is soooo different from the X100,  I may have to get an OVF for it ( the DP2M is a  ‘thing’  it doesn’t have any personality whatsoever) but it is so austere that I cannot imagine actually using it off tripod. After the 5D3 and the X100 displays ( even after my Ricoh GRD3 display) the DP2M struggles, its low res and wobbly so quite how it will suffice for manual focus I do not know, thank goodness the autofocus seems accurate ( deadly accurate thus far). I know that I’m never going to love my DP2M like I love the X100 but I sure as hell respect it already. It definitely and easily out - resolves the 5D3 with the Sigmalux 50 on it and I suspect even with the Zeiss 21 Distagon . Remarkable.