I picked up photography as a hobby in 2006. As the years went by, I grew tired of shooting clunky DSLRs. At that point, it had become such a chore to come back from your vacation, dump your RAWs into PC, load them into Lightroom and spend a couple of days going through, correcting the images, applying presets. So I started shooting less and less.
In 2017 I started working in a photography shop which, coincidentally, had its own film development lab. I’ve been shooting film throughout the years, but now all I had to do was shoot my roll of film, come to work, drop it into the machine, and in a couple of hours, I’d have my pictures ready! And the best thing was that I didn’t have to correct the images! The beautiful colors and grain of film seemed to come out perfect without any help needed. I fell in love with the film heavily. On any given day, I would carry around two film DSLR and one point-and-shoot film camera. Every camera had its own film loaded. Portra, Ektar, Pro 400H, 400TX. Now I could choose what film to use in any location. High saturation color film, punchy black, and white, you name it.
As my love for film photography grew, I spent an amount of money on the precious medium. At the end of summer 2017, I had spent more than 500$ on film alone. Not only my wallet but my back also felt the aftermath of carrying a bag with three cameras daily. And then I saw Fujifilm X100F.
Not only was it one of the most beautiful cameras on the market, with its compact analog design, tactile dials, and optical viewfinder, but it also had a wide array of beautiful film simulations. And let me emphasize – the Fujifilm film simulations are not your average, lackluster built-in presets that you should stay away from by all means. Industry color experts carefully develop Fujifilm film simulations.
At that moment, I knew I found my Holy Grail! X100F was very small, and I could switch between film effects whenever I like. And I cannot stress enough: the easier it is for you to carry around and whip out your camera, the more you shoot. The more you shoot, the better chances are for you to capture a great image! And did I say that that camera is VERY BEAUTIFUL?!?! It basically is tempting you to go out and shoot whenever you look at it. That’s a perfect camera in my book!