Chicago at Night

Walking the Streets of the Windy City With the Fujifilm X70

By Andy Johnson III

December 19^th, 2016

We took a trip home to Ohio to visit my family for Thanksgiving. I decided to use the occasion as a reason to rent the Fujifilm X70 and to try it out during our time with family. One of the reasons to tryout the X70 while with my family was for the shots that I try to get with my siblings as well as my nieces and nephews. Handing somebody else the camera to take the picture often misses the moment or leaves me with poorly framed or unfocused images. Flipping the screen up so that everyone in the picture could see what they would like was a welcome feature that I found myself using often.

Since Chicago is typically the cheapest place to fly through when I visit family, I ended up with a day in Chicago on the end of the trip before flying back to Los Angeles the following morning. This provided the opportunity to test the X70 as a walk-about camera, walking around the windy city at night and looking for scenes that captured my eye. This is the set of photos from that experience and my observations.

Flip screen

I worked remotely during the day but stopped by the Field Notes HQ in Chicago to see the place where my favorite notebooks are manufactured and shipped out. My picture in front of the door is a great example of how the flip screen enables more precise framing for self-portraits. I know that I could have just used an iPhone for this but the difference in image quality between a smartphone and the Fujifilm X series is not going away. After work, I started the evening with some delightful deep dish Chicago-style pizza at Lou Malnati's.

Handling

I walked from the restaurant back to the train station where I would catch the train to my hotel. I love the night lights in a city and especially in black and white. City lights give you something to look for, and make textures, reflections and contrast more vivid in the resulting images.

Although the Fujifilm X70 has a maximum aperture of f/2.8, for cityscapes I typically want enough depth of field to keep much of the image in focus anyway. This also enables the lens to stay quite small making the camera easy to carry around and pull out from a jacket pocket. It didn't hardly feel like I had a camera with me until the moment when I needed it. The only downside to the size is that it makes the controls slightly harder to access, at least for my fingers, since the camera is purposefully small. I can live with that though for the convenience of having this kind image quality in such a small package.

Image quality

I've always been amazed by the low light image quality of the Fujifilm X-Trans sensor. Although these images showed some noise, given the high ISOs I had to shoot at to capture them, it only took a little bit of noise reduction in Lightroom to smooth out the images. I don't use noise reduction often but the sky full of clouds dropping rain the entire evening looked better to my eye after being smoothed out. The X70 offered the same high image quality that I've come to expect from the Fuji X series.

28mm Equivalent

On my way to the train that would take me to the airport to catch my shuttle to the hotel, I stopped by Union Station and snapped a few pictures inside. Like so many of the oldest train stations, Union Station reflects the prestige of a previous era when trains were the way to travel in style.

One of the things that I like about the X70 is that uses an 18mm lens which is close to a 28mm full-frame equivalent. The focal length is almost exactly the same as an iPhone. Since shooting with an iPhone for several years is what motivated me to find a smaller camera and ultimately led me to the Fujifilm X series, this is a focal length that I'm familiar with and that feels quite natural. It's just wide enough to capture the scene but not so wide that everything ends up distorted. If I could only have one focal length available to me, I would probably choose a 28mm equivalent lens like what comes on the X70.

Conclusions

After using the Fujifilm X70 for a week, my conclusion is that I'm leaning toward purchasing one in the future to use as a small camera to carry everywhere and to capture our adventures in moments when it doesn't feel natural to carry larger equipment. The biggest downside to the camera of course is that it lacks an electronic viewfinder. This will certainly make it tricky to capture images on a sunny day. I can live with this though for the convenience of such terrific image quality in such a small package.

The X70 is also the first Fujifilm X series camera to feature a touch screen and I did find it useful for being able to tap the screen to choose a focal point and snap the picture. This will be useful for quick and inconspicuous shooting on the street and for capturing candid images of people. In summary, I enjoyed the camera and would recommend it to anyone who wants much better image quality than they can get from a smartphone yet in a small camera that they can carry everywhere.