Fuji X100s in Dominica

Introduction

I took my Fuji X100s (full review here) to the small Caribbean island of Dominica. Not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, but it’s also stop for most cruise ships in that area. Like most islands, it is a product of volcanic activity, counting no less than 9 active volcanos. But don’t worry, there haven’t been any significant magmatic eruptions since Columbus visited the island. Because of the rugged landscape that is virtually impossible to exploit, they do have the best and most extensively preserved tropical rain forests in the world.

Focusing issues withe the Fuji X100S

It proved to be somewhat of a challenge to use the Fuji X100s here. The rain forest is very humid, and the vegetation does not let it much light in. A problem for any rangefinder camera, but the X100s struggled even more to autofocus under these conditions.

Processing X100S files

I shoot in RAW, and I always bring a Macbook with me to transfer images daily to Lightroom. I always make use of the ‘make a second copy to’ in the import file handling menu to make a backup of my pictures to a small USB WD hard drive. If I have the time, I’ll do some editing on the fly while on location, but usually I tend to redo it once I’m home on my dual screen iMac.

I recently discovered OnOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite that has some interesting features and presets for travel photography. One of the things I like is the Perfect Eraser, handy to remove stop signs or other distractions in that fantastic image that is almost complete.

The Enhance Module does a better job at the basic colour and white balance adjustment than Adobe Lightroom does. Perfect Photo Suite does support a range of RAW types including the Fuji X100s, but I prefer to do the RAW handling in Adobe Lightroom.I then edit in one of the Perfect Photo modules or other software. Perfect Effects is another excellent module, which allows you to apply all kinds of effects from HDR to vintage, a lot of fun to use and tweak. The Lightroom integration makes it easy to go back and forth without any quality loss.