Fujifilm X

Eurasian Coots in the Pagodenburger See at the Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich.

A nesting coot in the lake and a coot on the shore foraging for food.

A few more photos of the #EdwardFire in Orland, CA today. Fortunately our house was never in danger. Sad that this fire was likely preventable with mere common sense about mowing. A few homes were lost. #EFire

Elk at Point Reyes National Seashore, California. Last March.

Now in bloom in our backyard: cultivated California Wild Roses (pic 1) and Elderberry (2). Still gorging themselves: ladybugs. Everywhere in our front yard. They’re just decimating aphids. Ladybugs particularly love coyote bush (3) and sage.

wild rose flower with white flower petalsyellow elderberry flowersbright orange ladybugs all over a coyote bush

Potatoe croquettes for lunch today. Great use of leftover mashed potatoes.

plated golden brown croquettes with one cut open, revealing fluffy white potatoes and chives

From last Monday near Tomales Point in beautiful California, a genus Arctia moth caterpillar on lupins.

red and black fuzzy caterpillar on slender pinnate lupine leaves.

From last Monday, a very loud acorn woodpecker at the Point Reyes National seashore visitor center.

red headed & black body acorn woodpecker laughing atop a light pole against a clear blue sky

Harvested our first homegrown Valencia orange this year. So very sweet. Even the pith isn’t bitter. We may want to harvest the rest early if there’s a freeze later this week. Fortunately there’s only a dozen-ish. ~243 mandarins harvested so far — makes great juice 🌱🌳

sliced valencia orangejuicing mandarins

First bloom for our Valencia orange tree. About three weeks early compared to 2020 & 2021. 🌱🌳

Ladybug larva gorging on aphids gorging on sage. And nearby, a bright orange ladybug pupa. 🐞 🌱

side view of black with orange spots ladybug larva on safe lead.top view of black with orange spots ladybug larva on sage leaf.bright orange ladybug pupa on dead sage leaves

Honey bee approaching a nectarine flower. 🌳🌱

Okay, for once in my life I managed to replace a key home feature without any frigg’n drama. Kitchen faucet replaced & why didn’t we do this sooner? The last faucet not only started leaking last night but years ago had seized into place - no swivel. Local Ace hardware was ace

Dynamic Range Priority Added to "What was my Fujifilm Recipe?" macOS 12 Shortcut

I’ve updated my “What was my Fujifilm Recipe?” macOS 12 Shortcut. It now includes support for Dynamic Range Priority. The “Scanned Superia” recipe from fujixweekly.com is added. The Shortcut now uses SHA1 hashing, as on modern processors it is much faster than MD5 (Intel and M1 Macs). I removed Grain since I often override it and it doesn’t seem important to ID recipes. Finally, I prefixed “Saturation " to the saturation keyword so that it is clear as to what that keyword refers to.

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We’re ending the year with disco fries. Everyone, have a good start to 2022.

Aebleskiver day!

Beer bottle label graveyard. Tomorrow is bottling day.

fragments of sheared beer labels

Mushrooms!

Better B&W Recipe Detection and exif Keywords added to macOS "What was my Fujifilm Recipe" Shortcut

I know that many people choose Fujifilm cameras for black and white photography. I hadn’t explored B&W photography yet so the original macOS “What was my Fujifilm Recipe” didn’t include one specific B&W recipe ingredient: BWAdjustment (Warm/Cool aka WC). So to better match black and white recipes, I’ve added the BWAdjustment exif tag that includes Warm/Cool (WC). Unfortunately, Magenta & Green (MG) setting for black and white toning doesn’t seem to be available in exiftool. So only WC is in BWAdjustment. Despite that, BWAdjustment with Saturation and White Balance should help make B&W film recipes to be a bit more unique for matching.

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Stuffing waffles for post-Thanksgiving breakfast is now 100% a tradition.

From Maui earlier this month: a few more early mornings with Haleakala.

sun peaking out from the peak of haleakalaan amazing pink dawn

macOS 12 Shortcut: What was my Fujifilm Recipe?

Screen Shot 2021 11 24 at 12 32 51 PM

NOTE: the link to this Shortcut, and then its changelog, is at the end of this page.

About

I’ve created a macOS 12 only Shortcut to remind me what Fujifilm Recipe or Film Simulation I used for my off the camera photos. It requires exiftool in your path (manually or via Homebrew etc). For some reason I couldn’t successfully compare dictionaries as text in an if statement so I am using hash.

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From Maui: Sea Turtle Part Photos

Here’s a collection of sea turtle parts while on Maui earlier this month. I made ample use of the X100V’s continuous shooting mode, getting several hundred photos and out of those only about six with clearly identifiable turtle parts. They’re amazing creatures and I can spend hours watching them from a distance that won’t stress them out.

You will likely need to tap on a photo to zoom in to see details of the turtle part(s) :-)

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From the left: Jupiter, Moon, Saturn. Then just the moon.

jupiter, half moon, saturnhalf-ish moon

Dragon’s Teeth at Kapalua, Hawaii.

I didn’t get why people include grain in their digital photos, thinking it is an anachronistic hipster thing. I’ve fully come around and find grain added by my camera can make photos seem sharper yet give blur and subjects more character. Photos feel better with grain.

Current Slate of Fujifilm Film Simulations

I’ve got a slate of six Film Simulations from Fuji X Weekly loaded on my X100V. Fuji X Weekly’s Film Recipes app is nice for a quick reference. Here’s what I’ll be working with for a while in hopes of greatly limiting RAW reprocessing with Straight-Out-Of-Camera (SOOC) JPEGs:

I figured out how to use Fujifilm X Raw Studio to save user settings to the camera. Depending on the RAW you’re using to create a user setting, it may not let you set a higher Dynamic Range so one must find a RAW shot with that dynamic range or higher or adjust that setting on the camera. I made sure to copy these to X Raw Studio’s User Settings to keep a backup. Oddly enough, the User Settings have more restrictions on allowable characters than the camera itself. As a Mac user, X Raw Studio is clunky as heck and has needless alert dialogs but it works well enough. It is clearly purpose built.

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Perfect field weather today.

Chocolate chip with walnut cookie connections.

No rest for birds this time of the year. Here’s a Yellow Rumped Warbler (lower right) and Lesser Gold Finch (upper left) in our cultivated native grapes.

Yellow Rumped Warbler (lower right) and Lesser Gold Finch (upper left) in our cultivated native grapes.

There’s a thoughtful post on Fuji X Weekly. After spending several weeks with a X100V, I’m in agreement with the utility and power of Fujifilm Film Simulations. As a hobbyist, it is liberating embracing Fujifilm out-of-camera JPEGs. I barely need the RAW Power app.