Snack out the weekend

Cold Saturday here in Houston: on week-ends we usually like to skip lunch but now we need something to keep us alive before dinner. We try Panera: never been there before and I heard of it just from some friends stories.

I bring in my Fuji X-T1 along with the resurrected Fujinon 35mm f/2. A must-have lens if you own a fuji mirrorless: you’ll have a great 50mm equivalent, in a super-compact and very light camera-lens combination. There’s an additional advantage for whoever likes street photography: it gives to your camera the look of a point-and-shoot and automatically classifies you as a tourist rather than a photographer. Nobody would ever complain if you include them in your ‘touristic souvenir’ photos!

Pasta and Mac…. enough to kick any Italian out of the restaurant just by looking at the pictures in the menu. But we are strong and resist the temptation of ‘tortellini Alfredo and chicken’ or the ambiguous ‘Maccheroni BBQ chicken and bacon’: we’d probably need another 25 year in US and maybe other 10 years in the Middle East before our taste buds get reprogrammed to these new tastes.

The small Fuji allows me to capture Marta’s moves and facial expression while the menu unrolls under her eyes: I love this mirrorless small camera and the every-day pictures I can bring home after each use.

In Panera the choice is vast and there’s just no reason not to try the Croissaint au chocolate (for Ruggero) and the vegetable soup (for Marta).

Last few word for the post-pro. For these every-day life picture, for which a black-and-white conversion would also work fine, I am using a combination of Lightroom filter (based on AGFA portrait film, analog) modified by me with a more ‘cinematic’ look on both the highlights and the shadows, then I apply a filter with Luminar from another analogic simulation package that you can download for free on the Skylum web site. I generally shoot with a high iso but the X-T1 sensor is so good in keeping the grain low that I generally add it in post pro. This is the proof of what I always tell to people who ask for a recommended camera and lens: the level of these days’ equipment is so high that the limit is, most of the times, the photographer!