Full Circles

I posted several photos to Instagram the other day. I decided on a theme: What is Red? My posts were in response to an ‘invitation’ to share red coloured photos with #capturecolors and @captureonepro in the captions of my posts. I thought to limit my post to photos taken in Ireland in 2020 and found six I liked. Submissions closed today and three Fuji cameras await the the best pictures posted with those tags.

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I noticed a bunch of other candidates that I had forgotten when making my ‘red’ selection, one of which included a red ball from the RHA in London.

Back in 2018, when we were working in the west end London, our daughter and her husband encouraged me to test their old Fuji X-E1 for street photography. I borrowed it and walked around London with the one 18-55 lens for four weeks. It was such a revelation to a Canon carrier that my wife made me a retirement gift of a Fuji X-T3.

I had taken just over four hundred photos with the X-E1 that October and amazingly, there were were over a hundred keepers. I didn’t know if that success rate was the street scenery or the camera until I started to notice the way I had changed my photography. I was shooting what I liked without thinking too much. And wonderfully, nobody turned or gurned like they do when the big Canon appears.

Sure, the 2012 X-E1 shutter lag was as woeful as on a smartphone but I adapted. The auto-focussing was poor but I compensated. It’s low light performance was noisy but I made that work for me. The battery life was dire but made me more decisive in order to save power. Technology leaped forward in the years between the launch dates of the X-E1 and the X-T3 and so these problems are long ago resolved on the modern X sensors.

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There was a cloudy day with yellow circles and another day with a brighter view across The Thames. And there was an indoor shot of me (taken by my wife) as we learned about Renzo Piano in the RHA. And permanent installation with the red ball downstairs. Plus two night shots of fireworks. And not a tripod or a flash anywhere!

Individually perhaps none are outstanding but together, they tell a story of full circles, embellishing journey’s end on the way from small cameras to big and back again.