Photography – Page 2 – Chris Koerner

WordCamp US 2024 – It’s been a while

This year I was fortunate to attend WordCamp US 2024 in one of my favorite cities, Portland, Oregon. I was not only able to attend, but was also one of the fortunate few selected to present. I heard tell that 350 folks submitted presentations for this event. I can only imagine the difficulty and work the volunteer organizers had in selecting speakers and am grateful for the opportunity.

It was an interesting intersection of my interests. For many years I was active in the local WordPress community as one of the event organizers for WordCamp St. Louis and the monthly WordPress meetup group. The pandemic put a big kibosh on my involvement and disrupted the community as a whole. It’s been five years since I’ve been at a WordPress-centric event, and this time I was there as a speaker. Life is funny that way.

I wanted to take a moment to jot down my notes and thoughts from the event. I learned a lot and met some interesting folks along the way.

Contributor Day

Tuesday kicked off the event with Contributor Day, which is a full day dedicated to improving WordPress. That could be contributing code to core, working on plug-ins, documentation, community building, or even video and marketing efforts. I ended up spending the first half of the day at the table for Openverse, a search engine for freely-licensed (Creative Commons) images and audio. Since I’ve contributed to Wikimedia Commons and work at the Foundation, I was curious to learn more.

I chatted with Zack Krida, Madison Swain-Bowden, and Krystle Salazar¹ and learned more about their work. The project originally started at Creative Commons in 2017 as CC Search, and was brought under the WordPress umbrella in 2021. It’s integrated into WordPress, allowing authors of any site to search and use freely licensed imagery from Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and more.

They face many of the same challenges Commons faces regarding reuse, attribution, NSFW content, and to a smaller degree moderation. They are mostly a front-end to existing repositories whereas Commons is a repository upon itself! We had some good chats, with far too little time to cover it all.

One WordPress-related pain point we shared was the lack of formal functionality in WordPress core for attribution and licensing information. Over the course of WordCamp US, I heard from no fewer than four presenters, along with a few side conversations, about how everyone ends up creating their own solution to manage these pieces of custom data. NASA, Vox Media, Disney, and others have all devised their own solutions. Even we at the Foundation, for Diff and the Foundation’s site, have created unique approaches—each a reinvention of the wheel. There’s a solid opportunity here to improve this in WordPress Core.

I was also able to reconnect with some friends from the St. Louis WordPress community, many of whom I haven’t been in contact with for five years. Pandemics, man. Jen Swisher, Joe McGill, David Smith, Mary and Dick, and Michelle were all regulars at WordCamp St. Louis back in the day. Maybe with things settling down, we might see more community building happening here in town…

For dinner, I sauntered out to Frank’s Noodle House and had a wonderful meal. I have a 99% success rate eating at restaurants that were formerly actual houses. Frank’s was no exception. ²

The pendulum in the Oregon Convention Center

Showcase Day

Showcase Day was a new addition to WordCamp US. It is described as, “an opportunity for creators to showcase some of their most innovative, interesting, and indubitably incomparable uses of WordPress”. So the coolest and most interesting uses of WordPress. I’d argue that they achieved this with the packed schedule. Here are the sessions I attended (so hard to choose!), with a few notes where I remembered.

Keynote: Reach for the Sky: A Magical Transformation with Gutenberg and Unlocking the Digital Evolution: Navigating the Gutenberg Era by Alexandra Guffey and Katrina Yates

These two back-to-back presentations – the first being the keynote of the day – covered how the Disney Experiences team used the block editor (Gutenberg) to design and develop custom blocks for their editorial needs. Two lovely folks from Disney talked about their strategy and approach. They created a main theme and used child themes for different sites. Each with blocks specific to those sites. A key takeaway quote from their work, “We are growing with Gutenberg instead of working against it.” Nice.

I also learned of the Gutenberg Storybook for WordPress components. A handy guide to know what components are available to reuse with variables and live code demos. A valuable resource. Instead of developing your own controls you can use these components to provide as close-to-core interface for editors as possible.

The Power of Extending the WordPress Editor: A Block Visibility Showcase by Nick Diego

Nick walked through a plugin he created called Block Visibility. It works with any block and allows you to adjust the visibility of blocks based on a smorgasbord of conditions. User roles, date and time, viewport size, and more. Along the way, I learned that the Group block can be made sticky, making it easy to create navigation items within the editor.

I also learned about how you can extend a WordPress block with custom functionality, which is a far better approach than creating a custom block from scratch, especially since core now contains many useful blocks.

Dynamic blocks also look rather interesting. “Dynamic blocks are blocks that build their structure and content on the fly when the block is rendered on the front end.”

My one idea for Nick’s Block Visibility plugin would be to incorporate visibility by language. So if the site language is set to Spanish, don’t show a promotion happening in English. Or if a block content is translated, show the appropriate language version.

Nick is also leading an Admin refresh and media library update to WordPress core. I’m going to be bugging him to learn more about that work soon. 🙂

I had lunch with some folks. Met TJ Mullinax and a few other folks. TJ is an interesting fellow. He lives in central Washington state and is a digital producer and photojournalist at Good Fruit Grower magazine. Which is a magazine about fruit cultivation with a history going back to the 1940s! They, naturally, use WordPress for their digital publication.

Reinventing Vox Media’s CMS: A WordPress Migration Journey by Thomas Stang, Anique Halliday, Stéphane Boisvert

This session was interesting because over the last twelve years Vox Media had built their own custom content management system called Chorus. They used it for all of their properties including Vox.com, The Verge, Polygon, and SB Nation. Migrating away from an in-house developed tool to an open-source project like WordPress is not only interesting from a technical perspective, but also from a business and political perspective. We now have one less CMS competing with WordPress, which isn’t great, but we also have another set of high-traffic and well-supported sites being built on top of WordPress.

From a community health perspective, I was interested in hearing about how readers of the websites handled this transition. It sounded, based on the presentation and conversations with the presenters afterward, that in most cases, folks didn’t even realize that a change had been made. In the case of Polylang in particular, the design of the site from the viewers’ perspective was exactly the same—a rather impressive magic trick.

Building a Block First Digital News Platform for Pew Research Center by Seth Rubenstein

I attended a session from Pew Research on how they build a new news platform using blocks – right before block patterns were a thing. Their blocks are rather complex items such as quizzes and charts. I was happy to learn that they give back by making their work available as open-source software!

Highlights from the Automattic Special Projects Team by Christy Nyiri

What a charming and whirlwind tour of the amazingly well-designed projects taken on by Automattic’s Special Projects Team! It was a very visual experience, so summarizing it too much here is a challenge and would not suffice.

I wish I had an ounce of the design chops these folks have. They showcased (see, it was Showcase Day) some really great designs and talked every so briefly about the work that went into each of them. Christy is a natural presenter and hit all the high notes.

A Technical Deep Dive Into Our Favorite Features of the New Harvard Gazette Site by Joeleen Kennedy

Joeleen led us through the work she and the fine folks at Human Made did for the Harvard Gazette. It was a great overview of the challenges of building something the editorial team can use that is flexible, but not so varied as to be inconsistent. I loved the little bit of genius for the dual-column layout on desktop and stacking the sidebar on mobile.

Speaking of Human Made, I wanted to take a moment to thank the crew for inviting me to sit with them at lunch – big middle school “someone asked me to sit with them vibes!”, so thank you – and for inviting me out for food and drinks. I had a great time getting to know them better as people. Wonderful people. KAdam, Joleen, Pam, Adam, Stuart, Kirsty, Jon, and Joe.

Conference Day 1

wp-admin as Mission Control by Gary Kovar

Anyone from NASA has an unfair advantage when presenting their work. I mean, it’s space exploration for Pete’s sake! Even with this frustratingly cool starting position, Gary delivered an interesting and informative dive into how NASA customized the WordPress dashboard to allow their editorial team to work quickly to develop news packages, articles, and the famous (and again, cool) Image of the Day feature.

The customizations to the dashboard have me thinking about how we might use that to make Diff, the community blog I support, more inviting and easier to use.

Building WordPress Websites with ‘Privacy by Design’ in Mind by Donata Stroink-Skillrud

Donata gave a really compelling and informative presentation on why you, average site developer, should give a hoot about GDPR, data collection, and user privacy. It was great to see someone who is not a designer or developer by trade presenting on their bailiwick and how it intersects with working with WordPress and the web. I found myself nodding at many of the points she made and internally yelling about the many clients I’ve worked with who have never considered privacy as part of their design.

This was the first day the Sponsor Hall was open. As I was wandering about during lunch I spotted a corner where a typewriter was set up allowing you to write some poetry. A gentleman was typing away and I asked if I could take a photo while they typed. They turned to me afterward, looked at my name badge, and said, “Wikimedia! I’m a Wikimedian!”. I had surprisingly ran into Younesh Dhaubhadel, a photographer from Nepal. He had participated in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2018 and came in second place in his region! Small world.

Decoding the Woo and WordPress Strategies of Industry Giants by Bryce Adams, Travis Lima

Brilliant title. While I don’t have much experience with WooCommerce, only using it on one site in my 15-year journey with WordPress, I do find it to be an impressive suite of tools for e-commerce. I love that it’s open-source, allowing company owners to control every bit of the experience without too many middlemen. This session was a grand tour of various implementations of WooCommerce and how the software can be customized to fit a seemingly endless set of circumstances.

Aside: I also learned about Universal Yums, which I just subscribed to. See! WooCommerce works! :p

Creating Client-Friendly Editing Experiences by Kristin Falkner

Kristin walked us through some great strategies for adapting WordPress to client expectations, reminding us that while we may be steeped in technology, some folks have actual work to do. 🙂 The ideas shared in this session have me reflecting on my own assumptions and how I might better communicate with and learn from those who use the sites I support.

One additional take away from this session was learning bout programs like Scribe and Screen Studio – apps that help create great video tutorials of software interfaces. This is something I will definitely include in any future client work.

After the group photo, I had the fortune to bump into Dinara Lima and her husband John Arthur Strauss. Both were, like me, carrying around some camera kit. John and I happened to be carrying the same camera, and we chatted for a bit. They came to WordCamp US all the way from São Paulo and were spending some time in the PNW area after the event.

Dinara made a nice video sharing her experiences at WordCamp US. Check it out!

Photo of group photo photographers photographing the group

Conference Day 2

How the Wikimedia Foundation Uses WordPress to Run an Open Community Blog for the Wikipedia Community and Beyond by Chris Koerner

Oh wait, this is me! I presented on our use of WordPress at the Wikimedia Foundation. How we took WordPress and with a few plugins, some customizations, and a bunch of tenacity made a multilingual, multi-author community blog.

The response to my presentation was really positive. People seemed inspired by the work we were doing. I had a few conversations with folks afterward about community building and keeping communities healthy. That giving some recognition and having awareness of other people can go a long way in building trust and mutual respect.

Unedited livestream

Releasing a Version of WordPress in 8 Hours or Less by Aaron Jorbin, Jonathan Desrosiers

This was an introspective review of just how interconnected software is. The speakers, Aaron and Jonathan, walked us through minute-by-minute, how a small but impactful bug was added to WordPress core and remedied within hours. I won’t spoil the cause, but some folks couldn’t update their sites because of it. Which is important!

It makes you think about how software can feel fragile and the importance of a robust, thoughtful community to help keep things going.

200,000 Games and Going: The Pandemic Kept Us Apart, But My WordPress Project Brought Us Together by Corey Maass

This was a really sweet session about how Corey built a digital board game during the pandemic that created a community and connection between people. A great example of going, “Huh, I didn’t think WordPress could do THAT!”. A great narrative and an interesting use of WordPress. :chefs kiss:

Enhancing WordPress Accessibility: Tools, Techniques, and Real-World Solutions by Jennifer Dust, Eli Frigoli

A great overview of the importance of accessibility and some useful tools to use – and avoid – to make your site more accessible. I found it particularly illuminating that automated “site checker” tools can give you a false sense of security, something I was not aware of and hadn’t really thought deeply about before.

This session reminds me that design for accessibly is not only for folks with a specific need, but for everyone. We all benefit now, and we’ll all eventually need some sort of aid as we age.

An In-Person Q&A With Matt Mullenweg by Matt Mullenweg

I actually went back to my hotel to watch this one remote. It was something. Terrible leadership from Matt and such a negative ding against WordPress as an ecosystem to invest in. I feel for all the folks impacted at WP Engine and beyond. Matt needs to log off and take a walk. Not being a jerk here, genuinely concerned for his well-being and the health of the community.

Misc Notes

I also learned – from which session I cannot remember – about work happening to allow WordPress admins to create and manage custom post types inside the admin interface. This is pretty cool no-code solution to something that a lot of sites need/use.

Custom fields and post types inside the block editor – with WordPress.com

Closing event at OMSI

This was the perfect venue to close out the event. A visually fun area to hang out in with dozens of built in ice breakers with all the various interactive exhibits. Kudos to the organizers for selecting OMSI and having it stuffed to the gills with food and things to do.

During dinner I talked with Ben from WP Engine who happened to see my presentation. We ended up at a table with fellow XOXO’er Tim Tate. Come to find out both Ben and Tim grew up in Boise! What are the odds. 🙂

Conclusion

I learned a lot from the different sessions I attended and appreciated all the speakers sharing their work so freely. I think the event organizers did a wonderful job in organizing the event. The signage was great. The rooms were well staffed. The audio/video work was flawless. Ok, there’s always a few hiccups. 🙂 Everyone I bumped into was friendly, and open to conversation. Five stars, would attend again.

One refrain I heard in talking to different people was the impact the pandemic had on a sense of community. How many of us are still recovering from that and how many were not present because of the now endemic nature of the virus. Five years later I felt like I missed a lot of WordPress events, but actually there haven’t been that many. It feels like we’re still getting back into the swing of things. For instance, it felt like there were fewer sponsors and vendors at WordCamp US this year than say five years ago. That could just be my subjective observation. I don’t know.

I have a lot of fondness for WordPress, both in what allows me to do as a professional, but in the strong sense of community and in the healthy way – I think –people help one another. Even while working under the horrendous umbrella of capitalism. It mirrors and mimics a lot of the work I do in the Wikimedia movement. I also like having another open-source web-based community separate from work to be invested in. So, I hope things continue to improve and maybe I’ll get back into the community in the future.

I took some photos along the way. A few have been scattered within this post. More are on Flickr.

On Truth and Interesting in Photography

I recently had a photo on Flickr go “viral”³ Maybe not viral in the 2024 understanding of the world, but popular for a few days. For me, and for as little presence that I have on the internet, it felt big. Fun and exciting. It made me happy.

It was also entirely by accident with little effort on my part. It has me having feelings.

This picture, which I took in 2014 and shared on Flickr at the time was not the photo that was popular for a day.⁴ At least, not exactly.

You see, Flickr has this feature called Explore. Here’s how Flickr themselves explain what Explore is:

Flickr’s Explore page is one of the most beloved features for photographers in the Flickr community. Powered by an algorithm we continue to fine-tune, the page displays a rotating array of about 500 images from Flickr members every day. Explore is a great way to seek inspiration, discover fantastic talent from the community, and connect with photographers who share your interests.

So as you use Flickr – uploading photos, tagging them with keywords, and adding them to community groups – the algorithm picks up on nascent activity and highlights photos on a special page at https://www.flickr.com/explore

If you just upload a photo and don’t engage with others on social/sharing side of things it’s unlikely you’d get a photo picked by the algorithm. That’s one thing I like about Flickr. You get out of it as much as you put into it. Looking at other photos, in Explore, in tag archives, and in groups, and engaging with other folks with likes, comments, and follows is what the site is all about.

An aside on Apple Photos

I’ve been getting back into photography with more gusto in the last few months. It’s a solid creative outlet and a way of dealing with my grief. I bought a new camera for travel and have been taking more opportunities to get away from the screen to take more photos.

I have hit one small snag. The new camera is so new that the RAW files from it are not supported by any of my Apple devices! I have to download the images to my desktop, run them through a converter, and then import them to my Apple Photo library for organizing and editing.⁵

Every Fall Apple releases new updates to their operating systems with new features. Curious if the new OSes would support more RAW formats, including the format from my new camera, I downloaded the beta version of the upcoming OS for my iPad, iPadOS 18.

Unfortunately as of this writing, iPadOS 18 does not have support for my camera. But, it does have an updated Photos app. So I was playing around with it one evening. There’s a new feature – new to me or new in this upcoming release – where the Photos app will suggest photos from your library that might make a good wallpaper image for your devices.

Screenshot of the Wallpaper Suggestions screen in Apple Photos

I thought one of the photos it suggested was rather stunning. I literally scrunched my face at the screen and thought, “Who took that photo? It’s really nice!”.

Oh wait, it was me.

Through some sort of algorithm, Apple Photos picked this photo from my library of over 63,000 images, applied a black-and-white filter, and said, “How about this one?”

I have to fully disclose that while I saw this photo and recognized it as an aesthetically pleasing photo, I didn’t pick it out and make these edits of my own skill. I didn’t spend hours in a photo editor tweaking settings to get just the right contrast in the black and white rendition.

Apple’s algorithm did that work and that made me feel both excited – that technology can do that – and a little sad. I thought to myself, “Why didn’t I see that‽”. Why didn’t I take the time to be selective and edit my photos with more attention?

Back to Flickr

I tweaked the settings a little bit from what the Photos app suggested and uploaded the black and white rendition to Flickr. I shared it in a few groups. Then I went to bed.

The next morning my phone was lit up with notifications. Flickr, through the Explore algorithm, selected my photo for the day. People liked it! Over a hundred and twenty likes. Nearly 4,600 views. The photo is now my second most popular photo by both views and likes. After nearly twenty years uploading and sharing photos. My first Explore.

More thoughts came to my mind. Why wasn’t the original photo interesting enough for Explore? Did I not put as much effort into things in 2014? Why I don’t edit my photos to be more dramatic and interesting and instead very lightly touch them?

I don’t do a lot of color adjustments, gradation or saturation, modifications or spot patching or anything like that. This event has me thinking about the kind of photography I do and how I edit the photos I share.

I seek out the truth in what I saw when out shooting. More so than taking a photo and trying to make it interesting. Maybe that makes me a weaker photographer or a boring photographer, but that’s what I like to do.

This whole ordeal has me asking more questions. Maybe I’m too technical and focused on the wrong things? Maybe I’m a better photographer cause I’m happy with what I take without editing? This is making me feel a little conflicted. Should I spend more time editing to get more emotion out of my photos?

Author, science educator, and YouTuber, Hank Green shared this thought in reflecting upon his work that his company Complexly does in creating educational materials on YouTube. It resonated with my thinking at the time.

“What makes something “interesting” is very different from what makes something true, which is a really powerful force that pulls us away from the truth in society. And I just want to say, that isn’t something that’s evil about people. I think it makes perfect sense, but it is a problem, which is why it’s so cool to get to work on teams that have developed a ton of expertise in how to make true things feel interesting. Trying to make interesting things feel true is a lot easier and a lot worse”

I know I can spend more time, editing my photos and dialing it into very interesting but for some reason that isn’t appealing to me, I’m more interested in trying to take a good photo with the camera. Even if that means it’s unlikely that a future upload will be “Explore-ed”. Does that make my photos more true? Less interesting?

But I’d rather do some light touch up before sharing what I think is closer to the truth – even realizing that all photos are edited and manipulate reality in some fashion. Either by viewpoint, or lens used, or framing, or so on and so forth.

I mean, look there’s tons of great, visually interesting, photos out there. In taking an OK photo and making it really impressive through lots of detailed work. That’s impressive.

I don’t begrudge anybody who does this. In fact, I wish I did more of it because obviously this resonates with people. That’s one thing I try to do through my own work.

As an aside, here’s a recent tutorial that I thought was really great and very helpful in thinking about this from a aesthetic and technical perspective.

I know this is how people edit photos professionally, but as a hobbyist, I don’t know. For me it is more about framing and taking the photos and seeing how they came out than it is trying to take a good or great photo and making it interesting.

Or maybe I’m lazy‽ :p

I haven’t decided what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll try editing a few photos before uploading more than I usually do. Maybe I won’t. But I will keep thinking about this.

As popular as ham radio

Photography as a hobby is a shrinking circle. It won’t ever go away, but it is much smaller than it ever was. I was reading this post from Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer and a few bits stood out to me from the post and comments.

Even if times really are changing, and people just aren’t interested in new cameras and better specs as much as they used to be, it doesn’t really matter that much. Here’s the thing: dedicated photographers are outsiders. I’ve always looked at us that way. We’re not attached to the industry; we’re not affected by fashions. We’re not driven by mass taste. We go our own way. We do our own thing.

As many middle-aged hipsters will attest, I love not doing mainstream hobbies. Even while I also love doing many other mainstream things. Photography is not mainstream and you can consider it outsider-ish, but at the same time more people have cameras – in their phones – than they have ever had stand-alone cameras! It’s the most mainstream thing you can think of!

It’s mainstream and outsider at the same time. To be human is to contain multitudes.

Another quote:

It’s clear to me that we’re in the sad twilight of the era of photography as a serious hobby. It’s rapidly heading for the same category as ham radio or model railroading: a quirky, shrinking tiny niche, regarded (if at all) with a flicker of tolerant amusement by the masses. I derived immense satisfaction and not a little joy from several decades spent honing my technical skills, learning how to use finicky gear, and teasing the best possible result from large format inkjets, all in service to a goal. That goal was creating the best possible photographic print. I still love a beautiful print, but it has become a niche skill. To the broader culture, photography now means billions of technically competent snapshots captured by increasingly sophisticated smart-phone cameras flooding the Internet every single day, each with the impact and lifespan of a just-hatched Mayfly or cicada.

Kind of a negative outlook, but I think I can still enjoy taking purposeful photos with my big camera while allowing others to enjoy snapshots with their smart phone – or even really good solid photos taken with a phone!

Another comment:

Strangely enough, I think it is the internet that lets those “tiny niches” survive. It is a “force multiplier” that allows a much smaller number of practitioners keep the niche alive and thriving to some extent.

When you were the editor of the model railroading magazine, magazines and clubs were the way these niches survived. As time went on and the number of practitioners shrank, magazines folded and clubs have withered and the practitioners moved to a community online where you can have a global community and draw from the whole connected world.

I “belong” to three of those niches: Photography, Garden Scale Model Railroading and HP calculators. I keep current in all three by belonging to a small but active online community. What is interesting, is that while you get your share of trolls, in general, the internet experience is much different than what you hear about in the wide world of the internet.

I don’t use popular social media and prefer the smaller corners of the web. Like dedicated forums, Flickr, community Slacks, and my personal blog. So this resonates with me.

But then again, maybe there’s hope for photography,

Another thing that’s interesting is that photography is unlikely to prove to be a generational phenomenon. Younger people aren’t showing any diminished interest in photography—quite the opposite in fact—they just won’t be practicing it in the way us older enthusiasts accepted as normal when we were young.

Hey, I just said the same thing! Ah, the joys of non-linear writing.

How to fix sync issues with Apple Photos on macOS

Notice that a selection of photos on one Mac are not syncing to the rest of your devices.
Restart Photos.
That didn’t work.
Restart the Mac.
Nope.
Open Activity Monitor and kill all processes with the word “photo”.
Hmm. No change.
Kill “bird”. You’re not sure what it does, but the internet says it’s part of the problem.
Nothing.
Delete the Syndication.photoslibrary deep in ~/Library/Photos.
Wait and be patient. Maybe days?
Ok, turn off iCloud in Photos preferences. Get nervous because that sounds dangerous. Wait, wasn’t all of this kinda risky?
Turn on iCloud in Photos preferences. Wait while you waste bandwidth and time.
The photos are syncing. Well some of them. Not ones that are edited. For some reason.
Wait, again.
Those dozen or so photos are still not syncing.
Rotate those few images to see if that helps.
It says it’s syncing! Yay
It does not sync all of them.
Quit Photos and then back to Activity Monitor again. Kill all process with the word “photo”.
Restart Photos. Wait.
Nothing at all.
Repair the library.
That was not it. Wait more than 24 hours.
Create an album with photos that won’t sync.
Share that album.
That almost works, except for any photos from the recent import that were edited.
So then you turn off (and on again) iCloud in Photos preferences.
Wait two days and it’s all fixed. ಠ_ಠ

X100VI

I recently bought a new camera. My first in over 12 years.⁶ The new camera is a Fujifilm X100VI, the latest in their line of fixed lens travel cameras.

It’s a very different camera than what I’ve been shooting with, a still wonderful Nikon D800. I love the D800, but I wanted something smaller and less complicated. Something I can just throw in a bag and not worry about which lens to bring – and the bulk. The D800 with an 50mm lens is close to 2.6 pounds! The X100VI by comparion is 1.15 lbs.

I’m still wrapping my head around the new camera. Learning the menus and commands and getting comfortable with setting it up how I like it. I’ve gone on one long trip and captured a few decent photos.

I wanted to document a few of the things I’ve learned along the way. To help reflect and reset my expectations – and hopefully so others can learn from my experiences.

All images are taken with the X100VI. Edited RAW files in Apple Photos. Full gallery on Flickr

Setup Command Dial

Unsurprisingly, I’ve customized the front and rear command dials to work just like the D800 – Aperture on the front dial, shutter speed on the rear. ISO set to Auto or I use the dial for specific needs.

This video from JayRegular was really helpful in figuring this out. One note, from Jay in the comments, is really important!

“For everyone who cannot get the aperture dial to work when set to “A” go into menu > wrench icon > button dial setting > aperture ring setting (A) and set it to ‘command’ instead of ‘auto'”

I love how many Fn buttons there are on this little guy and have been playing around with them. I have even set the manual focus ring to switch between the 50mm and 70mm digital teleconverter. It’s like a zoom ring (but not)!

Use the EVF

It’s faster than the optical viewfinder and gives you a better representation of how your shot will look. Coming from a D800 this was a big change to get use to. After a few outings, I’m starting to appreciate it more. I like the idea of an optical viewfinder, but with the offset on the X100VI – and with an added lens hood – it’s almost useless.⁷

Speed Things Up

Get a good SD card. You don’t need a UHS-II card as the X100VI only supports UHS-I cards. However, if you do buy a card that is faster than what the camera can utilize, you can still benefit when transferring images from the SD card to a computer. For example my Mac’s SD card slot can utilize UHS-II speeds up to 312 MB/s. I picked up a Sandisk that has a read rating of about 200MB/s. For the first week I used an old 80MB/s SD card I had lying around and it was so slow to save and preview images.

In the power management settings there is an option called “boost”. Turn this on. It helps with focus and viewfinder display performance.⁸ Two of the most key aspects of nailing a shot.

If you’re worried about battery life, Wasabi Power makes a great replacement battery (x2) and a charger for like $30. Way cheaper than Fuji’s own battery and the charger can charge two batteries at the same time over USB-C.

This was a wild one to learn. By default the X100VI will use 2.4GHz wi-fi to transfer images to your smartphone. Switch the wi-fi to 5GHz for noticeably faster transfer speeds. 5GHz has been around for over a decade at this point. It should be the default to give a better user experience and it’s one setting that can be easily overlooked.

Chris Lee (pal2tech on YouTube) created a great beginners setup video for this camera. I learned of this tip and a few others from his videos. Go check them out.

Shoot in RAW

Even though my photo editing app of choice doesn’t support the latest RAW (.RAF) files from this camera (yet), I’m still shooting RAW. Storage space is cheap and I love being able to pull the most range out of the images I shoot. I find JPEG/HEIF images direct from the camera to have too much contrast. Here’s a subtle example between a HEIF version and RAW version of the same image. The RAW file was converted to DNG so I can edit. No other edits to the images, direct from the camera.

Notice how much darker the HEIF image is in the eye sockets. There’s no data there to pull from when editing.

Move with your feet

This is just general photography advice and more of a reminder for myself. For the last 12 years I’ve shot primarily with my D800 and a fixed prime lens. Either a 50mm or an 85mm (for portraits). I’m use to shooting with these longer focal length lenses. The 35mm equivalent on the X100 means I need to move in more often. Or, be mindful that with this camera that you’re going to capture more surrounding context than you would with a longer lens.

You can also fib this a bit with the X100VI. With a 40 megapixel image size, cropping by 50% still gives you a very usable 20 megapixel image. I’m not a purist! Do both if that’s what works for you.

Trust in the Force IBIS

This is the first camera I’ve used that has in body image stabilization. I shoot mostly handheld and would never go below the reciprocal rule when shooting. So if I was shooting with my 85mm I would never go below ~1/100th of a second shutter speed. The resulting image, no how hard I tried to control my stance, grip, and breathing, would result in a blurry image.

But oh boy, the X100VI has five-axis stabilization. I can take a sharp photo, handheld, at a shutter speed far lower than the focal length. I’ve been able to get a few great shots at 1/25 and 1/15. That is pure magic. I’m having to learn that I have this new superpower and where its limits lie, but so far I’m really enjoying it. When I remember I can do it!

The wonderful Dave Etchells from Imaging Resource has this surprisingly in-depth interview with Hisashi Takeuchi from Olympus on how this all works. Fascinating stuff.

Conclusion

I’m heading out on another trip soon. This one a little longer and varied than the last. I’m hoping to have more to share and I’ll update this post if I come across any other tidbits that I think might be useful. Thanks for reading and please share your own tips in the comments and check out more of my photos on Flickr.