My Venice and the X-Pro2 – Part 3: The reality, Acros and much more

Finally here, the third instalment of my Venice story captured on photographs during this year’s FujiLove Venice Photography Workshop. Today I want to show you the real Venice. It is always what I enjoy photographing the most: capturing real life and real people. Capturing them in a way that looks beautiful. I always strive to create images that are visually striking and intriguing, but at the same time telling the real stories of the place I am currently visiting.

I took the majority of the images you will see in this article with the preproduction model of the Fujifilm X-Pro2. As you may know from my previous articles, I am extremely satisfied with this camera. It was a charm using it on the streets of Venice. Yet again, a Fuji body allowed me to easily mingle with the locals, to remain invisible when I wanted to do so, to stay respectful and keep the distance when I was photographing people face to face.

When walking down the narrow, non-touristy streets of Venice you get very close to people, there is no place to hide in a big crowd or shoot from inside a shopping mall through the front window. You are there, on those streets together with them, you have to “participate in their lives” in order to make some storytelling photographs. And more than often people will notice that you are photographing them.

I love this approach to street photography. I used to be much more “afraid” when it comes to photographing people on the streets, but today I feel different about it. I feel confident and I feel happy to show them a picture on the LCD screen of my camera and explain how nice and how important it is that I can show their lives and their place to those who have never been there, who are curious about it. I am genuinely amazed by the differences of any given place and I want to share these feelings with everyone who is looking at the photographs later (like you are doing it right now).

What interests me the most is the life and the inner thoughts of an individual person. When creating my street portraits I always try to put myself into the skin of the person I am photographing. I feel curious. What is she or he going through right now in his life? Where is he going? What is he thinking about? I find it extremely inspiring and at the same time I don’t want to know all the answers. I want my photographs to carry these questions and I want those looking at them (including myself later) to keep asking these questions again and again.

What are these two ladies talking about?

Where might be she heading to?

I don’t understand much Italian, but the conversation at the other table seemed to be extremely amusing. What were they chatting about?

In-between photographing people I also capture the surroundings. I want to place all of them in context. I want to show their place, I want to picture the atmosphere they are living in. While I can rely on my camera so much, the actual process of photographing becomes occasionally almost random. I react. I unconsciously react to things, any particular scenes, which catch my eye.

ACROS – new Fujifilm B&W Simulation Mode

As you might know by now, I love black and white. And it has only been the Fujifilm X cameras that awakened my “colourful senses” from a deep sleep. I experiment much more with colour these days, but my heart keeps beating the strongest for black and white photography. You can only imagine my excitement when I heard that Fujifilm was going to implement a new black and white simulation mode in the X-Pro2. Venice was the place where I could finally put ACROS through its paces.

ACROS is Fujifilm’s first black and white simulation mode, which is actually named after their original negative monochrome film. In the article posted on the Fujifilm website they wrote that till now it was still “too early to name a simulation mode after any monochrome films, which are all legendary”.

So, as you know, till today we could have been choosing from four B&W simulations: standard, B&W red filter, B&W yellow filter and B&W green filter.

What ACROS is aiming to simulate is the very fine grain, which was characteristic to the negative film, and the print-like texture of the image, which is supposed to be resembling a photograph printed on a photographic paper.

The ACROS tonal curve (in comparison to the above mentioned standard B&W simulation modes) is slightly more articulated. It goes lower in the shadows range and climbs a bit higher in the highlights. To achieve the finest grain effect Fujifilm incorporated also a completely new noise reduction algorithm. It basically takes the original file and applies a very carefully crafted grain pattern to give the images that unique, filmic look. You will enjoy this special image character even more if you push your ISO setting higher.

I will not go further into the technical details of what’s happening on the sensor and what kind of algorithms are being applied. You know it’s not me. Want I want to tell you is the fact, that if you are really into black and white photography, I am pretty convinced that you will be enjoying the ACROS images coming straight of your X-Pro2. The difference between the standard B&W simulations and ACROS is very slight, very subtle, but – trust me – for a trained eye this difference might be huge. The overall look of the ACROS files is beautiful. When shooting in Venice I was setting my Highlights setting on +1 and my Shadows on +2 (I am a big fan of dark shadow areas in my shots). When I downloaded my images into Lightroom I found myself pushing the shadows even further down. Not much, just a tiny bit. But that’s me. That is how I like it.

Being able to refine my black and white photography makes me genuinely happy. I find capturing everyday’s moments on black and white photographs very fulfilling. It gives the photographs a timeless look, it makes the viewer concentrate on the essence of the scene, it helps me draw viewer’s attention on the element I am intending to show.

During the 2016 FujiLove Venice Workshop I shared my approach and enthusiasm with a group of new photographers, who – as they told me – have never tried this kind of “street photography” before. I tend to call it travel fine art photography, for lack of a better term. I will be announcing a few FujiLove workshops very soon. What are the places you would love to photograph?