For a craft that is, at its heart, a creative effort, it amazes me that you’d have to read 100 books about making better photographs before you read anything on the creative process. And it’s not that it’s the job of these educators to teach creativity, but still. I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now, two photographers beside me. They’ve been here for an hour talking about making better photographs and the conversation hasn’t yet moved past a discussion of Tamron lenses. I’ll wait all day before they talk about the important stuff.

The truth is, I don’t want to be first a photographer. I want to be a creator. If that means I use a camera, great. If it means I use words, instead, just as good. I want to point at beauty and make experiences. Not everyone’s like that. But if creating is what you want, if you to BE more creative, here’s 5 things I’ve noticed about truly creative people. And by creative I don’t mean they’re artsy or original, just that they consistently create.

They See Possibilities.
Creative people are constantly asking What If? They work with challenges constantly and don’t focus on them, they focus on the potential outcomes. They’re positive and not easily put off by failure. They resonate with the words of Buckminster Fuller: “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.” They understand that creation is a process, not a product, and that mistakes are some of the best tools for learning lessons and finding new directions.

Want to be more creative? Make more mistakes and see them as part of the process, not a failure of the process. You can not create without risk.

They Ingest Everything.
Steve Jobs said creativity was really just a matter of connecting dots that haven’t been connected before. Truly creative people know that the brain will only connect dots that it is aware of. So they collect a lot of dots, from a lot of different places. They read deeply, and as widely as possible. They’re curious, knowing that the most original, and unexpected solutions to problems, will come from connections that brain makes between unexpected sources. So they collect those sources. Einstein was quoted as saying he had no special genius only passionate curiosity. Part of this is spending time with other creative people outside our usual circles. Photographers would be better artists if they spent less time with other photographers, and more time talking to painters and poets and authors.

Want to be more creative? Read up on topics other than photography, go see a play, take a life drawing class, do something that increases your inputs in an area seemingly unrelated to photography.

They Incubate.
Ideas don’t come out of the blue. They come as result of collecting a great many inputs, and letting them stew together. Inputs + Time. You have to give things a chance, and that means thinking about other things. Go play guitar. Go for a walk. Learn something new. Write a poem. Fingerpaint. Get a massage.

Corner a comedian and tell him to “say something funny,” and he’ll get really quiet and awkward. Your brain will do the same when you demand it just come up with a great idea out of the blue. Creative people know that time napping is not time wasted.

Want to be more creative? Make sure you get down-time. Hang the hammock and take a nap. Don’t rush the process.

They Ship.  
You can come up with a million great ideas, but unless you make them happen, you miss the chance to put them into the real world and see them evolve and become their truest potential. Ideators are not the same as creators. The brain’s a great place for initiating an idea, but it can’t stay there. Scott Belsky, using words I’ve taken as a personal mantra, calls it living a life with a “strong bias toward action.” Creative people hear as many, if not more, voices telling them their ideas won’t work. They see as many, if not more, distractions as others do. They know if they don’t act, and make it happen, it never will. They don’t fool themselves into thinking their work is done once “they’ve had a great idea.” Having ideas is not the work of creative people, it’s just the to-do list.

Want to be more creative? Take action on ideas immediately. You don’t have to pull it all off today, but take the first step. Make work prints for that exhibit you’re dreaming of. Book the models or the studio for that shoot. Take your first steps the same day you decide to you want to play with this idea.

They Know Quantity Matters.
I’ve read of a couple studies now that directly link quantity with quality in the lives of creative people. Not that quantity is the point, nor that a lot of ideas is the same as good ideas, but people that consistently create have the luxury of getting the bad ideas out of the way, moving more quickly past the projects that don’t work, and into those rarer projects that do work much more often. In Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, there’s a great story about a teacher who told half his ceramics class to make one great piece, and the other half to make as many pieces as they could. The half of the class that created quantity was also the half of the class in which was found the best of the work. The best writers write often, usually every day. The strongest photographers have their first 10,000 frames long behind them. The path to mastery, and greater creativity, doesn’t come without volume anymore than learning a language comes without using the same words over and over again, getting mistakes out of the way, until they become natural. Quantity is not quality, but it heads in that direction.

Want to be more creative? Make more photographs. Stop talking about photography and go make photographs. Creation lies in the doing, not the talking.

Want more? Try these:
Brain Pickings  – A great website about creativity.

99u.com – Insights on making ideas happen.

Zig Zag, The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity, Keith Sawyer - I’m reading this book now and it’s full of great insights and practical exercises.

How To Think Like Leonardo DaVinci, Michael J. Gelb. My thanks to my friend Jeff Kennedy for giving this book to me. Highly recommended.

The Inspired Eye Series – I wrote these, so I’m partial to them, but these three eBooks, available in a bundle for only $12, talk about the creative process, specific to photographers, and will give you some strong direction as you hone your own creativity.

TED Talks  – Great stuff in here. Pick one a day, at random and see what you can’t learn.

Today Adobe released Lightroom 5, and the changes are amazing. With every version Lightroom gets better and better, but every time they change things up it means time re-learning the software and adapting its new features to our workflow.

Who better to lean over your shoulder for a couple hours than a guy who’s a gifted teacher and Adobe Certified Expert, to show you all the new features and how to get started using them? Piet van Den Eynde rocks this kind of thing, and when I download Lightroom 5 I will be working through this 77-page eBook and the companion videos to get up to speed. It’s $5 and it walks you through, in Piet’s usual clear and concise way, every new feature in Lightroom 5.

Lightroom 5 Up to Speed walks you through the installation of Lr5, the new Advanced Healing Brush (finally!), Upright, Radial Filter, Smart Previews (offline editing of my images? Hallelujah!), the improvements to Book and Slideshow modules, and almost 30 other changes, big and small. He also gives you a couple pages of heads-up about plug-ins available for, and compatible with Lr5. Did I mention it’s only $5!

If you’re looking for a more complete shot at learning Lightroom 5, we’ve bundled Piet’s excellent book, Lightroom 4 UnMasked, which is MASSIVE, along with Lightroom 5 Up to Speed, and are offering this bundle for $20, which amounts to getting Lightroom 5 Up to Speed for free when you buy the other. We’ve locked in the savings! No discount code is needed to purchase this massive bundle for just $20 (that’s a full-time savings of $5).

And as always, buying 5 or more products from the Craft & Vision store, until June 23 (11:59 PM PST) and using code LR520 when checking out, will get you 20% off. Want even better value? Check out the bundles, which are already a great deal, and throw 5 of them in your cart.

BUY LIGHTROOM 5 UP TO SPEED ($5)

BUY THE LIGHTROOM BUNDLE ($20)

Left & Found I and II, Liguria, Italy 2013

I started a new project this weekend, excited by the possibilities and driven by the need to just get my work out there. So often I think we pull back from sharing our work for fear of the cost, fear of a loss of control, fear of theft, fear of rejection and God knows what else. And so it sits on hard-drives, sits on shelves. I want mine out there, and last year at one of our Vancouver Gatherings someone asked me for some ideas on sharing and I threw this one out: print your work and leave it somewhere. A random act of guerilla-style spreading of beauty. If what you really want is just to share it, why not?

And then the idea kept poking at me until I was sitting at Milano, the coffee shop in my new neighborhood in Vancouver’s Gastown, reading a book about ideas and creativity and out of nowhere it came back, this time with a name: Left & Found. So every month I’m printing between 20 and 40 prints in an on-going limited edition series. All about 8×5, they’re printed on fine art paper, hand-signed and numbered, and I’ve written a small URL on the back so people can find more information about the Left &Found project. The first ones get placed this week. In a year I’ll have put almost 400 prints out there, left on coffee shop tables, counters, in restaurants and shops – to be found, enjoyed, overlooked, torn, bent, collected, adored, misunderstood, or whatever else happens to our art when we release it into the world to take on a life we could never have foreseen.

It’s not much, but the more I do this the more sure I am that the question, “How can I make money at this?” isn’t remotely as interesting as a simpler question: how can I create work I love and share that work in new ways?

I’ve been planning this trip to the Khutzeymateen for a while now, not because I’ve got a particular thing for bears in particular, or that I have any desire to become a wildlife photographer, though as life goes on I’ve got less use for the labels anyways. I went because I’ve loved wilderness since I was a kid taking first walks in the Black Forest, and later, in a kayak my father made, summers in Canada’s Algonquin Park, a place I still long for in my dreams, falling asleep in the tent to the sounds of loons calling across the lake. I went because I’ve got this wild notion that when you get a wild notion you just need to say, Yes, and do it. So I signed on for two back-to-back trips with the Ocean Light II, a 72-foot ketch-rigged sailboat that takes clients to some of the wilder places on British Columbia’s coast, hoping to relax a little and explore the new direction my work began to take in Hokkaido.

Packing, I took as little as I could. I joined the Ocean Light II in the Khutzeymateen Inlet, a 20-minute flight in a Beaver float plane, away from Prince Rupert, which is either a 2-hour flight or a 20-hour drive from Vancouver, and the weight limit was a strict 60lbs. Even with my lightest technical down sleeping bag, which weighs only 2lbs, and a couple pairs each of underwear and socks, I was forced to pull out my tripod. I’ll put my packing list at the bottom of this post for those for whom that’s helpful, but here’s the broad strokes:

It rained like the gods were weeping, all day, for at least 4 of my 6 days. Best clothing choice was waterproof gear – jacket and pants – from Patagonia, knee-high boots from the Muck Boot Company, and Icebreaker layers underneath. Best gear choice was two Think Tank Photo Hydrophobia rain covers. I loathe rain covers, and I’ll do almost anything to avoid using them, but these are the best I’ve found, though the aweful truth is that I had to go to YouTube to find out how to unscrew the eyepiece ring from my Nikons in order to mount the eyepiece for the covers. And you thought the pros were meant to know that kind of thing.

Most of the photography happened from inflatable zodiacs and with the larger lens – a 300/2.8 with a 2x – I could have used a monopod. My friend Jon had one with a beautiful Really Right Stuff head on it that I might look into. But in the end it wasn’t the images from the 300/600 focal lengths that I liked best. The Khutzeymateen was an amazing place, and the encounters with the bears were extremely intimate, thanks to the presence of my guide, Tom, who’s been there over the last 25 years and knows – and respects – these bears. It’s easy to get a frame filled with a bear using these long lenses, but I’ve never been interested in the “look how big this lens makes this duck look” kind of photography. I wanted to make photographs that expressed some of the intimacy of the place and for that the longer lenses just don’t work for me, so in the end most of my best work was done with either the 16-35/4.0 or the 70-200/2.8. You can choose your lens based on how close it gets you, though I’ve often joked that you might not want to use a wide angle for making photographs of bears, or you can choose your lens based on behaviour and aesthetics – nothing works for me like a wide angle lens pushed in close. Which brings me to the question, “So how close were you?!” which isn’t really the point, but begs to be answered photographically.

We were close. Sometimes so close I felt I could reach out and touch them (not really, but it seemed that way). But we were safe, and I think the greatest take-away on this adventure was what I learned from Tom, with whom I had long conversations, who taught me how to approach these amazing animals. Turns out it’s not much different than you do with people. You go slow. You go with care and respect. You give them the chance, through body language in this case, to say no, and you back off when they do. You wait for them to invite you into their space. And you take your leave before you outstay your welcome. Grizzlies are large, powerful animals, they aren’t like big, cuddly, dogs, and they move with astonishing speed, but they give signs when they’ve had enough or don’t want you there. Respect that and have a guide with his hand on the throttle, and the possibility of truly intimate encounters is there. Look at the image at the top of this post, the mother let us be with her and her two cubs for two days, never showing anything more than curiosity, and eventual boredom, with us.  She played with her cubs, nursed them, and watched over them, or just lay down to sleep. She trusted us. And that allowed us to photograph slowly, intentionally, and with shorter lenses. I will always believe that respect, curiosity, and a willingness to slow down, are among the most important skills for photographers. You also have to put in the time, which is why I booked 2 back-to-back trips because 3 days didn’t seem long enough for me to explore the place and get comfortable with the bears. I’d love to go back every year and make this an on-going body of work. I live in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen and this year’s the first year I’ve started to photograph it.

One of the things I wanted from this work, once I began to figure out what the place was for me, was a warm, calm, consistent colour palette, and I wrestled with it for a while because the greens in this place are so visually massive, and pull the eye so much, that they were almost neon and drew my attention away from the bears. So I created a preset in Lightroom that pulled the greens back a little – less saturation, and less blue in the hue of the greens. I added some clarity to draw attention to the texture, and I pushed my colour temperature a little, though I shot on cloudy most of the time, so often I had to pull it back towards cooler. I think one of the things painters and other visual artists do well is pay greater attention to their colour palettes and that’s something I’m trying to be more intentional about. In the end I think I managed to create something with the kind of mood and magic I felt about the place, and the bears, and allowing the gesture in the frame to speak for itself.

The boat, the Ocean Light II, was an amazing home and I can’t wait to be back on it in July as we explore the Gwaii Haanas. Every night we’d come back from the estuary and eat an amazing meal while images imported, and talked about the day, shaking our head at the beauty and wonder of it, we’d dry out our clothes, check tide charts for the morning, then go to bed while batteries charged. I can’t imagine a more perfect week.

Here’s my packing list:

Icebreaker merino T-shirts – 2
Icebreaker merino Long-Sleeves – 2
Icebreaker merino Long Underwear – 2
Icebreaker merino underwear/socks – 3 each
Icebreaker merino toque and gloves
Pants – 2
Icebreaker merino sweaters, light – 2
1 Patagonia fleece, heavy
Patagonia rain jacket
Patagonia rain pants
Muck Boot Co. boots
Boat shoes/ Sneakers
Baseball hat

Towel
Sleeping Bag
twin sheet / pillowcase
water bottle
toiletries

Nikon D800 and D3s
Nikon 16-35/4.0, 70-200/2.8, 300/2.8, 2x
Batteries, chargers
sensor cleaning kit
Lens cloths – 10
Hydrophobia 300/600, Hydrophobia 70-200
CF / SD cards
11″ MacBook Air, AC cable
Card reader

iPad, cable
iPhone, cable, headphones
Moleskine notebook, pens.

Eveything packed into lightweight O.R. dry sacs and then into either my large North Face Expedition duffle bag or my GuraGear Bataflae backpack which I love more with every passing day. Another thing I found helpful was a large climbing carabiner. I keep one on my camera bag and use it almost every trip to clip my cameras to something – in this case the zodiac. Up-Strap bandolier straps are what I use all the time now, and they’re easy to tie into a quick knot to shorten them up and clip to something.

For a first look at the photographs from this trip, check them out on this post and on this post.

Some thoughts about the way we talk about photographs. As always, I think the questions are more important than the answers. I’m not looking for consensus, just giving voice to my own thoughts and questions. Yours might be different.

Thought the First.
“Nice capture,” says nothing about what you felt when you experienced a photograph. It says nothing about art. It says nothing, really, more than, “Good job.” Our hearts are in the right place, I know, but we can do better. In this language, aside from it perpetuating the language of predation (we shoot, we capture), there’s something missing: creation. Photographs are made, they are not captured. The best of them are profoundly more than just nice, or simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And the photographers saying the most interesting things with their photographs are not looking for praise, but for an attentive audience.

Thought the Second.
What if our first response to a photograph was to listen to the photographer? What if, when it was finally time to talk about the photograph, we did so with greater humility, even greater vulnerability? What if we used that photograph as a starting place for a discussion about what the photographer was pointing at, instead of the prevalent, “If this was my photograph, I’d have done…” to which my only reply is, “Stop talking about it and go make your own photograph.”

Thought the Third
One of the things I hear often in image discussions is how this or that element in the photograph “is distracting.” I think we need to begin these discussions with the assumption the photographer is pointing at something and our first job is to look for it. It’s valid to ask “does the photographer want me looking at X or Y in this frame, because that’s where my eye gets pulled.” To skip that and go straight to, “that’s a distraction,” skips the important step of asking what the photographer’s saying and goes straight to assuming he should have done it the way we’d done it. Photography is a language; we could use a little more listening in photography and a little less talking.

Thought the Fourth
I think we’d all make better photographs if we stopped talking so much about them, and asking others what they think about them, and go made more photographs. Unless of course it’s not photographs we’re interested in but the praise of others. Sometimes a photograph is a means to say, “Look at this!” and other times a means to say, “Look at me!”  I’ve got too many of the latter and not enough of the former. The ones made for the latter will always be forgettable.

A few more from my recent time in the Khutzeymateen. I can’t even put into words how this place has gripped my affections and my imagination. The first set of images, if you missed them, is here.

Just off the float plane from a week in British Columbia’s Khutzeymateen. I’ll write more later, and put up another photograph or two, but wanted to drop a postcard your way. I’ve pulled these straight out of Lightroom on the 11″ MacBook Air, so they’re rough images yet, but man was this a mind-blowing week. One of the most intimate encounters I’ve had with the wilderness. Felt like I was on sacred ground and holy waters the whole time. Good to be back, but I miss the bears already. My new friends on the Ocean Light 2 as well. I’m back with them photographing the Gwaii Haanas (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) in July and it’ll feel like a long time between now and then.

While I was gone, if you missed it, we published Vision Is Better 3, the third in the series. If you like this blog, you can get the best of its content, plus some new material, and much better images, all curated in a beautiful package for $5, but there’s a bundle of all three books, for only $10. More information on this post about it.

Over the course of the year I put what I hope is a solid body of great education on this blog – essays and tutorials and photographs from my journey in this craft that I hope will teach and inspire you wherever you are in your own photographic journey. Vision Is Better 3 is the third time we’ve compiled that material into what’s become one of Craft & Vision’s best-selling eBook series. Re-edited, and put together with much larger photographs, Vision Is Better 3 gives you offline access to 145 pages of beautifully laid out material, 52 articles, including two previously unpublished articles (Don’t Get Ahead of the Muse, and Simplify, Simplify) and expanded “Postcards From…” features.

Buy the PDF

Buy the Bundle

We don’t do the hard-sell around here, so I’m happy to tell you most of the material in this eBook is available right here on the blog completely free. If you want to dig for it, there are years of free material, and it’ll always be free to you. But if you want something a little more curated, with bigger photographs, and you want it sitting on your tablet or laptop even when you’re offline, this is great value.

Vision is Better 3 is only $5. It picks up where Vision Is Better 2 left off, and if you’ve not purchased either of the first two books, you can get all three in a bundle for $10. That’s about 4 years of content for the price of a couple lattes and these won’t make you feel bloated and gassy.

Buy 5 or more titles (bundled titles count as one product) from the Craft & Vision store by May 26th at 11:59 PM (PST)  and use discount code VIBTHREE20 and you’ll save 20%.

The Fuji XE-1 doesn’t matter. There’s a bandwagon forming around this camera, and I hate bandwagons. They never seem to gather around things that truly matter.

I get asked about gear all the time. Once in a while I write something about it. And yes, gear matters in the sense that without it we’d be drawing with pencil and paper. Certain photographers have specific needs, and faster, bigger cameras can meet those needs. But you know what? In a year or two there will be a new, hot, camera. In a couple years, many of us with today’s greatest camera will be swapping it out for something new, convinced by the voices in our heads that we need it if we’re going to make photographs as good as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Avedon, Karsh, Galen Rowell, or whomever. All of whom, by the way, didn’t have cameras remotely as sophisticated as we have now. All of whom created iconic work on the cameras we now pass over in our lust for something new, for some magic wand, addicted as we are to cameras and not the photographs they make.

I’ve been saying for years that there is no magic wand. I was wrong. There is. It’s making photographs. Thousands and thousands of photographs. It’s being honest with ourselves and not trying to be someone else. It’s giving the craft time to grow and not expecting to master something overnight that others have taken a lifetime to do. It’s studying photographs and knowing what they provoke in you and why. It’s looking to painters and designers and others who work in two dimensions and learning from them. It’s relentlessly looking for light, lines, and moments. Some of us can do astonishing things with 12 strobes, and can HDR the crap out of 16 frames taken on a $40,000 Hasselblad, but still can’t make a photograph anyone truly gives a damn about. The internet is full of them: technically perfect, frequently lauded with “Nice capture, man,” and utterly forgettable. I think I’d weep if the best you could say about my photographs is that they’re tack sharp and perfectly exposed.

We’re all looking for the perfect little box with a hole in it, and they’re sexy little things, I’ll give you that. The best ones feel good in the hands and I’m the first one to tell you I love the tactility of this craft, but Leica’s red dot isn’t going to make my photographs any better. Thinking differently will do that. Wrestling with new ideas and compositions will do that. Replacing the gear catalogs and popular magazines that are packed with ads – voices telling you you can “shoot like a pro” with the newest camera – with books of actual photographs, will help you do that. Putting down your fancy D4 and picking up a completely manual 35mm camera for a while might do that, too. And yes, a small mirrorless camera like the new flock of Fujis might do that for you. Or it won’t. If you aren’t making beautiful, honest, photographs with the camera you have now, you won’t do it with the one you’re lusting for. I promise.

I know I’ve preached this sermon before. I know it gets old. I also know it might get read as a rant, but it’s truly not. The camera collectors will collect, with no interest in making something that moves hearts or opens eyes, and God bless’em if that’s what makes them happy. But most of you, at least the ones reading this, want that. So do I. We want it so badly it hurts, and the long years ahead to mastery feel like a joy on the rare days they don’t feel so damn frustrating. But things get cloudy sometimes and it doesn’t help that people like me once in a while tell you how great this new camera or that new lens is. And those people – including me sometimes – need also to be reminded that none of it really matters. Just get a camera that feels good in your hands, does what you need it do without getting in the way, and then go make photographs. How new, shiny, sexy, small, large, or European, your camera is doesn’t make a hill of beans’ worth of difference to how it moves the human heart. Astonishing work is created on old lenses, Polaroids, Holgas, old Digital Rebels, and the venerable AE-1. You won’t impress anyone, other than other photographers, with your list of L-lenses. The only thing most of us truly care about are the photographs. The rest is irrelevant. Don’t let it sidetrack you. Envy, gear-lust, and the lie that better gear will make more compelling photographs just pulls your mind and heart from making art. Beauty can be made with the simplest of means.

I spent three weeks in Italy this month, making photographs, teaching, and looking for great food and wine. I took with me the Fuji XE-1 and two lenses, the 14mm and the 18-55mm, both from Fuji. I took them because I wanted a light kit, because for places like Venice I just won’t walk around all day if my gear is too heavy. The Fuji was perfect. But I also wanted to give myself some new creative constraints and I’d heard such good things from others, mostly about the Fuji’s sensor, that I had to see if it would work well for me. So I took a couple 64GB SD cards, slapped on a Really Right Stuff plate with grip (the BXE1 set here), and took it to Europe.

What I expected was a good camera for street and candid photography and a mediocre camera for landscapes. I expected light, but at the expense of useability. And frankly, I expected a little of the frustration I’d had with some of the quirks of Fuji’s first foray into this category: the X100, which I struggled to really love while everyone else lauded it. I came home a convert, though with some caveats. Here, in no particular order, are some of my reactions:

• I loved the size and handling. It’s a little light, but with the Really Right Stuff L-plate and grip, it was perfect. Hardly noticed it was there. Except when it was falling off my shoulder. The strap Fuji provides is too small for me. In the end I had a shoe-maker take the Fuji strap apart and make me a sexy new one that’s about 12 inches longer, out of ostrich leather. It’s crazy sexy and I can now wear it bandolier-style the way I like.
• The lenses were fantastic, especially the 14mm which despite the initially confusing focusing clutch (I have to do WHAT to make this lens work?!), has depth of field markings on the lens making it easy to set the lens to f/11, find my hyperfocal distance and shoot without focusing. I love that. As for quality, they’re crazy sharp. The 14mm also has a dedicated manual aperture ring on the barrel, which I also love, but it moves far too smoothly for me and I’d constantly find my aperture changed. A strip of gaffer tape that holds down the ring will do, but I shouldn’t have to. Rubber band might work too.
• The sensor is amazing and I shot at crazy-high ISO without thinking twice about it, in part because I like the look. Very film-like to my eye.
• I love the ability to crop in-camera to 1:1 or 16:9, from the default 2:3, but I don’t see why I can’t do 4:5. Or, for that matter, a custom size. I shot on 1:1 for the whole trip, because it forced me to compose with a different frame and I find those constraints very freeing and energizing. I’m pretty strict with myself about getting it right in-camera, but because I shoot in RAW I can always change my mind or slightly re-crop.
• I love the ability to shoot in B&W, and because it’s an electronic viewfinder, I can see my scene that way. I shot in B&W the whole trip, and even though I will render most of the work in colour, the ability to see without colour and focus on the moment and the lines is fantastic. Again, because I shoot in RAW, I can do what I like with the file and I’m not stuck with only B&W images as I would if I shot only in JPG.
• I love the manual shutter and EV compensation dials, though like the aperture ring on the 14mm, the EV comp dial moves a little too freely for my taste.
• Nice to have in-viewfinder histogram and virtual horizon.
• The X-Pro 1 forces you to use an old school cable release, but the XE-1 has an available electronic one. Setting the XE-1 to Bulb and locking the release activates the shutter and shows a timer on the display so I can watch my long exposures without staring at a tiny LCD on the release itself. I love that. Add a smaller Lee adaptor and it takes my full landscape set-up. Looks a little goofy, but I’ve given up trying to look cool and be a photographer at the same time.
• The writing on the bezel surrounding the lens element reflected in my filters. Lens makers should know better. This is a silly convention. I taped mine up. It’s ugly but it works.
• Quirks? Not many. I love the Q menu for fast access to menu items. The means by which focus points are changed is cumbersome and requires me to do some weird gymnastics with my fingers. I’d love to see that changed. It’s not the fastest start-up and sometimes the focus hunted a little, but I expected worse, so wound up pleasantly surprised. The XE-1 shoots bursts up to 6fps but takes forever to process and I’m still scratching my head on how to view the sequences. Why not just let me look at them as sequential images, Fuji? Very odd.
• There’s an M-mount adaptor available for the XE-1 which means the availability of lenses is amazing, though the price-tag won’t be cheap. Leica isn’t known for being inexpensive.

The bottom line for me is: do I enjoy using the camera, does it stay out of my way as much as possible, and how good are the photographs? We’ll all answer these kinds of questions differently, but for me the answer were, Yes, Mostly, and Fantastic. I love this thing. Will it replace my DSLR? Sometimes, yes. I’ll use it in Oaxaca for Day of the Dead. I’ll use it in Ethiopia for Orthodox Christmas. And I’ll use it beside my D3s and D800 on other trips, like my upcoming grizzly bear trip or my safaris. If you’ve been contemplating a smaller camera, you owe it to yourself to try the XE-1. It won’t help you see light, lines, or moments any better, but it’s capable enough to capture them beautifully.

If you want to see some of the images from this camera, and you’ve not already seen the postcards I published last week, you can see them on this post, this post, and finally this post.