Experimenting With Presets
I feel like I'm the only Fujifilm user who has not downloaded presets from Fuji X Weekly to use when I'm out shooting street photography. I've occasionally used the preloaded presets that come with the camera, but as far as going online and programming in some presets meant to look like it was taken with a film camera? I'd never done that before but I was always curious about it. I cannot even remember which preset I used. I used a few different ones all with varying degrees of success. I took my camera out on my lunch hour to see what I could get. Here are the keepers from that day.The first thing I noticed when I started taking pictures with this preset (I wish I could remember which one I used. I believe it had "V2" in it but I could be mistaken) was that I liked the orange-y tone it gave the photos. Like when the sun is low in the sky and the light is golden and perfect. I also like that it had a desaturated look, just like a film photograph.I am not a massive fan of shots in portrait orientation. In my opinion, they really only look good on Instagram and on your phone in general, but I like to switch things up a bit so I took this shot in portrait orientation. I also am not a fan in any way of any kind of smoke (seriously, it smells absolutely disgusting and it's bad for your health), but it did make for an interesting photo. Here's one more portrait orientation shot. I have no idea why I like this picture so much. I took it while I was walking, so the women are barely in the frame. The lighting is blown out to shit, but I just really like it. For me, because the lighting is so harsh it makes me look away towards the women. I would have liked to have gotten closer, but the cars coming in all directions made that impossible. 😁 There's something about one of those steam pipes that make me have to take a picture. I feel like it's such a classic New York City street scene that any shot you take of it will come out nice. I once saw someone walk through the steam (not on purpose) and thought that it would have made such a cool shot, and then I mentally kicked myself for not having my camera with me.This is my favorite shot of the day. I would have preferred to get the man when he was in the middle of the three sets of stairs, but it is an extremely busy area and people were about to walk through the scene from both directions so I was lucky to get this shot. I love the dark shadows at the top of the stairs and the slight orange tone of the rest of the shot where the light is.All in all I really enjoyed using the presets, but I honestly prefer to do my own editing. There were quite a few shots where the scene was interesting but the lighting was all wrong and the orange tone (that I love in the shots posted) made it look like a big mess. The presets are fun to use but I probably will just stick to editing them myself. I know the point of the presets was just to have fun and not worry so much about editing (which is a pain in the you know what and part of the reason I still have pictures from my trip to Abu Dhabi in May with not even the slightest bit of editing). However, maybe it's a control thing, but I like being able to make the creative adjustments that I want. Using the presets has made me want to switch up my editing a bit and desaturate things, add a little more grain, experiment with heavy shadows and harsh lighting, so besides being fun to use, it definitely encouraged me to experiment a bit more.