A few images from a visit to Cork (Ireland) with the Fuji XE-1

Now Cork is a great place to visit and when it combines with the Guinness jazz festival I thought it would be a good place to put my newly acquired Fuji XE-1 thought its paces. I had chosen to stay with prime lenses with this camera and so all these images were shot using the 18mm and 35mm Fuji primes, which equate to approx 28mm and 56 mm with the sensor crop.

Fuji have some great info on their web site as well as the mini-product site at http://fujifilm-x.com/x-e1/en/. Worth a look if you are interested, but do please come back here to finish reading my post.

I  have to say I loved using the XE-1 camera – setting the aperture and shutter speed is easy and you quickly start to enjoy having it in the hand and framing the shot using the rear screen. I have yet to use the electronic view finder that the XE-1 comes with, but there is time to try this in the future.  Overall I thought the XE-1 performed really well giving good details and colours. The lighting conditions in some of the venues were challenging to say the least and it needed an ISO setting of 6400 to have any chance of getting an image and yet I feel it returned some acceptable images despite the difficult lighting.

Outside on the street the camera performed equally as well capturing some of the things that attracted me as we walked around the streets visiting the sites off and around As  Patrick Street. and also visiting some of the more interesting bars.

Mutton Lane, with its candlelit dark corners and some fine tasty pints was again a good place to test out the XE-1 low light capabilities, they opened 20mins early for me so managed to get some images without customers. As well as the main Patrick Street.
One recommended addition to the XE-1 is a grip and following some research on the web I found a Fuji users website on which there were a lot of recommendations for the i_shoot grip for the Fuji XE-1. It comes from China and I think it is made there for the Really Right Stuff company  as it looks exactly like one of their items but costs considerable less than the RRS grip.

I purchased it via ebay and it arrived in about 14 days and is a great addition to the XE-1. Far better than the Fuji grip as there is no need to remove it to change the battery or memory card. It also fits the tripod head mount so that is a win win for me.

Overall I really like the XE-1 and looking forward to using it again in trying it out in the studio too.