daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
I’ve found a new use for my beloved and broken Fujifilm XF1 camera. It’s literally a paperweight. It has enough weight to hold down the pages of my sheet music book and traveler’s notebook, and the leather cover keeps it from sliding off the pages.
It’s a real shame that the XF1 is broken, but this model suffers from a design flaw that Fujifilm has never acknowledged and is pointless to fix since it will just break again. The size, quality, and design of the XF1 was brilliant, and the line carried on with the XQ1 and XQ2. I’m tempted to buy an XQ2, but my six-year-old Fujifilm X100T is still serving me well. So for now, I’ll just admire the design of the XF1 as it serves it’s new purpose and be thankful that it was the camera that got me into the Fujifilm world.
こんにちは. How’s it going?
Today’s photo is of the sunset and clouds that I enjoyed as I drove back to Austin from Houston. Often when I make this drive, it’s already dark, but today I left a little earlier which worked out nicely! I even set up the GoPro to take this “TimeWarp” video:
I hope you had a nice day! またね～
Today I bought a new camera: the GoPro Hero9 Black. I’ve owned a cheap action cam for a couple of years, but the poor quality of the stabilization made it pretty much unusable. I only paid $35 for the Victure AC600 and the old adage “You get what you pay for” certainly applies here.
The GoPro Hero9 Black cost $399, but the quality is amazing. The stabilization is unreal! I’m going to have a lot of fun using it to record my bicycle and motorcycle rides.
Take a look at the video I made while wearing the GoPro on a chest mount:
And below is the $35 Victure for comparison. Apologies if you suffer from motion-sickness, but I even applied Warp Stabilization using Adobe Premiere Pro! You can imagine how bad it is straight out of camera.
The GoPro cost 10x as much as the Victure, which is quite a jump, but because I never use the Victure, it’s basically worthless (however, it did include various action-cam mounts and hardware which I can use). Also, the GoPro has timelapse capabilities which surpass my Fujifilm X100T, so my timelapse videos of clouds will see a big bump in quality.
I’m very happy with the GoPro Hero9 Black. I haven’t bought a decent quality camera for myself since 2015, so I’m really enjoying that new camera feeling!
I like the Fujifilm X100T bokeh.
📷♥
Tonight the International Space Station (ISS) was very bright as it passed over Texas, and I had my camera and tripod set up to capture it. I didn’t really know what kind of settings to use, so I just went with a typical exposure that I normally do. Unfortunately there were a lot of clouds obscuring the view, but I think the photo turned out okay.
I made a series of 10-second exposures, then stacked them in Photoshop to create the composite image above. You might notice that there appear to be double stars. This is because I hid a few layers in the Photoshop stack when the ISS was passing behind the clouds so the overall cloud coverage would be reduced, and this resulted in the star trails having a gap in them.
FYI, this website is a fantastic resource to see when satellites will be flying overhead. It uses Google Street View to show you exactly where to look from your viewpoint! Just make sure that your watch is synchronized to the atomic clock so you know when to look up.
