Nea Moni of Chios - Fuji X100V

I was fortunate enough to be able to take the family to Greece this past June, on a brief visit for my 1st Cousin's wedding on the island of Chios. Prior to the trip, I was able to snag a Fuji X100V, and I put it through its paces at the many beautiful locations on the island. The first stop was the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Nea Moni, an 11th century monastery on the island.

I had been looking for a premium compact travel camera to supplement my film shooting. After my recent trip to Puerto Rico where I just brought my Nikon F3, I had decided that I was done traveling around with my bulky D800 and lenses. While my iPhone proved to be a very decent digital companion to the F3, I knew that I wanted something quite a bit nicer. The only problem was, the "something" that I wanted (X100V) had been sold out everywhere for quite some time due to global chip shortages.

Thanks to some Grey Market internet sluething, I was able to find an X100V in stock for a decent price. I was excited to bring the new camera to Greece, but having been a Nikon shooter for the majority of my life, I knew that there would be a learning curve.

Luckily, the many physical dials and buttons on the X100V allow for heavy customization, allowing me to map the aperture and shutter speed functions to mimic what I am used to on the Nikon cameras. In terms of features, being ~12 years newer than my aging D800, the X100V feels a bit like a space ship compared to what I'm used to; high quality video recording, excellent face and eye detetion, film simulations - there was more for me to learn than I had time for on a vacation, so I stuck to the basics of shooting manual with an Astia film preset, with softer shadows and contrast.

One of the coolest features of the camera is a built in 4-stop ND filter, allowing you to shoot with the - very sharp, f/2.0 - lens wide open, even at high noon. This yields bokeh-licious shots that would be difficult to achieve with the amount of day light that you'll get midday on a sunny day in Greece. On the other end of the spectrum, photos were usable all the way up to 6400 ISO, though I rarely shot above 3200.

Over 2 weeks, I ended up with 574 shots that I selected and exported from all of the pictures that I had taken. Those are pictures that likely would not have been taken if I were shooting with a phone, or needing to lug a large camera around - they certainly would not have been taken if I were paying ~$15 a roll for 36 shots, haha. (Come to think of it, I couldn't even find any film while I was in Greece). I'll be sharing a lot more from my trip, but in short, I loved carrying around my very capable little travel / street camera. There's also so much to dive into with the user-customizable flim recipes (see Fuji X Weekly), and the camera is just so much fun to shoot with. You'll be seeing a lot of posts from this camera on this blog!