I went up to see my wife, since she is an engineer for SRF Consulting here in North Dakota and her project is out there in Williston, but I figured I could take a few pictures while I was out there. Now she did still have to work, though, so I got to hang out with her on her paving site, where she is an inspector.
Before I go more into it, it seems that every time I drive to Williston there is an amazing sunset.
A few more photos here before I close out this blog post. Not too many people want to read about construction, so I will finish out with my thoughts on how the X-T1 performed here:
What I liked:
Handling:
Having a smaller camera in this situation I feel was definitely beneficial. I could move around more easily and stay out of the way more than if I had been carrying my D4 or D800.
Exposure:
Being able to see the exposure in the viewfinder is awesome. With a hugely backlit scene in a lot of these photos I was able to dial in my exposure compensation in order to preserve details in the much more interesting foreground. With my Nikon gear I would have had to take a few test shots to dial in the settings so that the backlighting wasn't as bad.
Tilting Screen:
Sometimes to get the super low shots the tilting screen was awesome, but it also allowed me to be more on the look-out for machinery or workers and stay out of the way more than if I would have had my face pressed into a DSLR viewfinder the whole time.
Image Quality:
In this situation the image quality was awesome. Yes it was a low ISO thing, but there is something about the Fuji colors that I love over even my D800.
WiFi to phone:
A lot of my Wife's family doesn't really know what it is that she does, so it was really nice to be able to shoot the Jpeg photos (shooting in RAW+ Jpeg) to my phone and post them to facebook or instagram. Those are some of my most-liked images, actually. It was nice
What I didn't necessarily like:
Weather Sealing:
None of the lenses that I was using are weather sealed, and it is QUITE dusty in Williston. I had to do quite a lens and sensor cleaning when I got home. The perfect lens for this whole day would have been the upcoming in 2015 Fujifilm 16-55 f/2.8 R WR weather sealed lens. So if Fujifilm wants to send me one of those I'll go take more construction photos with this great system.
Battery life:
Since I was using the LCD on the back a bit, the battery life did suffer a bit. I think in around 7 hours of shooting that day I went through 3 or 4 batteries. That was with leaving the camera on with the EVF+eye sensor going, so that could have contributed a bit, but not too much.
And since that was a HUGE block of text, I'll leave you with one more super artsy photo:
Until I stop being lazy and actually write more of these...
Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios