Fall Photo Shoot With Athena

My outdoor photography season is winding down.  Typically I try to get to Cox Arboretum once or twice a year, and I had not made it yet this year.  So this past weekend seemed like an ideal time to make it out to this fantastic public park for some photography.  in the last few years, visitors to the park, have been permitted to bring dogs with them, so it was a good opportunity to spend some time with my Rottweiler Athena and get some good photos of her.

Since I would be by myself with Athena on a leash I decided to just bring my FujiFilm X100VI.  Since there are several small lakes in the park I decided to attach a K&F Concept Nano-X CPL filter to the lens.  it would also add some protection to the lens – when your camera has a single fixed lens you need to be extra careful.

In some respects the camera was perfect for this outing.   It’s small, light, and easy to manipulate with one hand – Handy because my other hand was either holding a leash or a treat, trying to get my subject properly composed.   In other respects, it was less than ideal and at times quite frustrating, mostly due to the screen on the back of the camera.  For most of these shots because I was holding the leash and trying to get the camera at the dogs level, I was unable to look through the viewfinder.  So I was pretty dependent on the flip out screen.  Unfortunately it’s not bright enough to be seen well outdoors in bright daylight.  I’ll caveat that with the fact that I really wasn’t in a position to try to fidget with the settings in the camera to increase the brightness of the screen.  It also isn’t a fully articulating pop out screen like on my Canon bodies.  Which works reasonably well if you’re taking landscape photos, but if you rotate the camera into portrait mode, the pop out screen doesn’t help you much at all.  I also was frustrated with the auto focus.  It was in the “general“ setting and not the animal auto focus, which I probably should’ve set.  In far too many cases during the photo shoot, I was touching the screen, trying to force the camera to focus on her.  I probably had a 75% hit rate and still came away with plenty of great shots (accuracy by volume…).  All of the photos were taken with the lens wide open at F2.  Let me know what you think of the photos:

we’ve had a very dry summer and fall so the leaves on the trees in the park weren’t showing much color but already half the leaves had dropped to the ground.  But I still managed to get a couple of nice shots in the park:

Again, I’m overall pleased with the photos I came away with during the shoot.  Despite the challenges, the X100VI was the right camera to bring and I’m glad that I have it available to use in situations like this.

I should note that during post processing Adobe‘s new AI functionality in Photoshop came in extremely handy.  I was able to use it to successfully remove Athena‘s leash from every photo.  I’m also finding that I’m using the FujiFilm film simulations less frequently and more often using the default color profile and editing it in Lightroom.  That’s not necessarily good or bad… Just an observation.  I still would like to plan an all black-and-white photo shoot using the Acros film simulation.  Maybe next year.