First impressions with a Nikon ZF

September 06, 2025

The amazing folk at Beau Photos (https://www.beauphoto.com) rented me a Nikon ZF to try out with the large but stellar Nikon 35mm 1.8s lens. I’ve got it for the weekend and had a chance to shoot a few frames whiles out doing some chores. The world is filled with great reviews so won’t waste time here but it’s “almost” like shooting the old Nikon FM style camera’s which is great! Lens and sensor are amazing and anyone would be lucky to have this!

However so far I’m not in love with it but it is making me love my X100 vi more! Firstly the weight and size is massive (compared. to what I currently shoot with) and it felt pretty intrusive on the street. But my biggest beef with pretty much all modern camera’s is the exposure triangle (aperture, exposure, ISO) is not on the camera in physical dials. On the ZF the ISO and exposure are, but the aperture isn’t on the lens. For me access to the 3 major components that impact the photo seem like a non-negotiable.

As with many modern camera’s I also find the autofocus (although blazingly fast) unintuitive and I couldn’t guess how to make the camera track what I wanted it to. I am sure it’s in the manual, but I’ve made a practice of never reading manuals, and I’m not going to start now. User interfaces are like jokes; if you have to explain them, they aren’t very good.

It’s a beast of a camera though and the quality of the photos is beyond a doubt better than the X100vi.

But for me (so far!) I’m not tempted to switch them out. The Nikon XF is a better camera with more flexibility, but I don’t need the flexibility at the moment and experience is king. However, here’s some photos I took over the past 24 hrs.

Intentional Composition

September 03, 2025

In my hours of YouTube browsing I can across the videos of Gil Kreslavsky (https://www.kreslavsky.com) (https://www.youtube.com/@GilKreslavsky) who I cannot recommend enough. If you shoot street, watch his videos, you’ll learn more in an hour than you’ve in a year. I know I did.

Nice and early this morning I was out with my camera waiting for the cafe to open so spent some time playing with composition techniques. Some days I think I’ll rename my blog “sometimes almost” since that’s how I feel about most of my work, but I can see how practicing the techniques he suggested will elevate my work massively. Then I can rename my blog “always almost”!

The compositional techniques I was playing with were; leading lines, frame within a frame, and asymmetry:

Abstract

September 01, 2025 in Artistry

“Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...”

John Wyndham – Day of the Triffids

August 29th

August 30, 2025 in Street Photography

Not that it’s specifically interesting but got out and took photos in the early morning and the PNE. Playing more with darkness.

It’s not about the bike (camera)

August 28, 2025 in Artistry

I didn’t write this article for you, I wrote it for me. And I will probably ignore my own advice and buy a new camera anyway.

Recently I’ve fallen out of love with the FujiFilm x100. Somehow it doesn’t speak to me, or fill me with passion. It’s an unbelievably beautiful piece of tech that takes stunning photos or at least it can. Really, the FujiFilm x100 is the height of technical mastery, but I don’t love it. The best thing I can do now is sell it and by the Leica Q2 Monochrom.

Ok, be honest now. [1]

Right. The truth is I want to buy the Leica Q2 Monochrom and I’ll have to sell the x100 to fund it, plus I need to justify the purchase.

No, be really honest!

Fine. I haven’t been taking photos recently, I feel bad about it and I’m rusty, so I’ll blame the camera and fantasize that I’ll immediately reconnect with photography if I have a new camera in hand. Buying another camera allows me to feel like I’m a photographer without actually putting in the work.

Was that so hard? It was brutal. But if we are truly honest with ourselves we can put our energy into what matters, what will actually change our lives rather than doom scrolling through a thousand shiny ads and product placements for overpriced device that won’t actually change anything about our photos.

It’s like the fad diet effect. We find a new diet, go on it and magically lose weight! We then tell everyone who’ll listen how great the diet is. But the truth is with the new diet we start to pay more attention to what we eat, we go to the gym, and we quit drinking for a while. Basically, aside from the diet, we do all the things we’re supposed to get to the shape we want to be in but haven’t done because it’s hard work and we struggle to self-motivate.

When we get new gear we play with it, try out new ideas, but most importantly WE SHOOT EVERYDAY. We practice our craft, improve our muscle memory and invest time in our passion. So, we get better. HUGE surprise.

It really isn’t about the camera unless you have a very specific genre you shoot. My phone is a bazillion [2] times better than my Leica M4-2 when it comes to features and technology. [3] There’s so many tired truisms on “the camera on you” but there’s an element of accuracy there. I, and probably you, have all the camera(s) we could ever need.

Now if only I could buy motivation…

[1] Said in the voice of David Beckham

[2] it’s a word, look it up

[3] Not so much when it comes to UX and ability to beat off attacking bears

Vespa + Camera. Nice.

July 06, 2025

Is a scooter the best invention for a photographer? It just might be!

For an urban (and maybe suburban) photographer it’s great to be able to bounce around the city, looking for opportunities to photograph.

My Simple Photography Workflow: One Camera, One Phone, One Keyboard

July 05, 2025

My current obsession is how to simplify my kit down to as little as possible. After years of wanting “the perfect setup” and lusting after $10,000 cameras to take the same photos i could get with an iPhone (i know, it hurts, but we know its true) I lost pretty much all interest in photography due to life in general and the explosion of over processed stock-like photography.

I got a box and put everything in it and put it away. And dreamt of being a master painter instead (how’s that going Simon? Anything in the National Gallery yet?). But the thing is I do like photography and I like to believe I could quit the corporate life and magically become a Vietnam War era photographer. So I picked up a Fujifilm X100 and decided if I could get my interest back then I would eventually go get one of those $10,000 cameras. But the honest truth is I haven’t got anywhere close to the limits of what the X100 can do, and the workflow is insanely simple.

So I’ve been playing around with the simplest travel package (traveling the world on a 49 cc Vespa - my other realistic plan) with the smallest footprint that makes sense. Plus with “cheap” gear that is easily replaceable.

So current package is:

Camera: Fujifilm X100 with black and white film-like recipe set to output both jpeg and raw files. Plus a tabletop $15 tripod. Plus screw in filters, couple of batteries and a pocket full of cards

Post-production: iPhone 15 with a foldable keyboard. JPEG photos transferred via USB-C for on-the-go publishing

Headphones: Meza Audio in-ear monitor

So I’m sitting in JJ Bean typing this out on the keyboard which folds down to the size of my phone. Photos are transferred to Photos, and then the whole thing is uploaded via Squarespace iOS app to my site. Bish bash bosh. 40 minutes from going out, taking a couple of photos, writing some random stream of consciousness, and publishing the whole thing to fill up some small corner of the internet where nobody ever goes.

Magic.

Less with more

July 01, 2025 in Travel

Or is it the other way around?

Testing out writing to the journal here with the app and on my phone.

Currently dreaming of long distance travel on a Vespa 50cc. There’s something compelling about the slow pace, low volume, simplicity of the idea that appeals. Lots of great videos out there on trips, including this one where the guy travels around Morocco on his Vespa (ok issue #1 can’t paste a link!)

I’m always looking to simplify my gear and get it down to as small a package as possible. I’m shooting the Fujifilm X100 vi pretty much exclusively and figuring out how to make do with a 35mm lens. One of the very cool aspects is the ability to apply a “look” to the jpegs and output directly to my phone either with a cable or wifi.

The images here are from the beach this morning. Assuming I can upload them in this app!

Update! Figured out how to link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MbRJjN_F_TU&pp=ygUNVmVzcGEgbW9yb2Njbw%3D%3D

Bit west coast really...

September 29, 2024

Got to spend a little time in Manning Park and then at Alice Lake in North Vancouver. It’s hard to beat the ghostly beauty of the west coast.

Photography at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires

August 02, 2024 in Artistry, Travel

When thou shalt have allotted me my fire I will not fare here from the dark again. As living men we'll no more sit apart from our companions, making plans. The day of wrath appointed for me at my birth engulfed and took me down.

Homer

Slow time moving quickly

July 14, 2024 in Experimentation

Spending a little time with my Fujifilm, an ND1000, cable release, and tripod. Plus a little pop and drag action.

Making not producing

October 04, 2022 in Artistry

I’ve been reading "The meaning in the making" by Sean Tucker. In discussing Logos, he asks “do we want to elicit a favourable response from others by playing to the crowd, or do we want to speak the Truth as we see it with the things we make"

I've been thinking about that and how it relates to my relationship with Instagram. The process of creating and the posting to instagram and hoping for likes is crushing any sense of Truth in my practice. The pursuit of Likes is an end unto itself and each time I post there, I find I hate photography just a little more.

But then how do you get feedback? How can you grow as an artist?

I think its the relationship between the art and the viewer that has been damaged by instagram. The conversation reduced to impressions and likes. A race to the bottom, No meaning just content.

I want to get back to making, communicating the Truth as I experience it. To creating rather than producing.

So I'm going to focus more on publishing here, on my blog. I've no idea if you'll see it, I've no idea if you'll like it. Maybe when we talk you'll tell me. Or perhaps give me the gift l most want; constructive feedback.

To start with, a photo of my beautiful wife Maura. who gives me more love and support than I could ask for, And probably more than I deserve.

5 Frames with... my 28mm

June 15, 2018

At the end of last years European adventure when we had to head home and pretend to be responsible adults, I snuck in one last moment of childlike abandon and got a 28mm Summicron lens (second-hand, I’m not THAT crazy) for the Leica. As it turns out, my M4-2 doesn’t have a 28mm lens line on the viewfinder so I’ve really struggled to use it. And I’ve not taken it with me and basically pondered selling it for a more expensive 50mm lens (can you say Summilux ASPH?).

I thought I’d better give it one last try and see if I could get anything I liked with it. Jury is still out, but I liked it more than I did in the winter...

Left without saying goodbye - 1/30 @ f4.0 TriX400

Prepping your five a day - 1/60 @ f8 TriX400

Still love the daily grind - 1/30 f4 TriX400

Trying hard? Or hardly trying? - f11 1/1000 TriX400

What’s in a name?

March 30, 2018

Back in the naughties (which weren’t as naughty as I would have liked) it was all about personal branding. As a wide eyed wannabe photographer I followed the time honoured tradition of obsessing over hideously expensive cameras, lighting gear, lenses, and thinking up a good name for my soon to be awesome business. And of course avoiding shooting and actually developing my craft.

I spent a lot of time developing out a brand, thinking up a name (seriously, how perfect is f/otographique?) and building out a website to display my soon to be awesome photos. And continued to avoid shooting.

When I did shoot I didn’t really have any idea what to say. I got technically better but the images were frankly boring. And honestly I got a bit disillusioned. I still wanted to be a photographer but I couldn’t see a pathway. Photography has so many possibilities and it’s easy to get lost into trying to do everything instead of getting good at doing one thing.

A couple of years ago I had an idea. Shoot film. Slow down and think about what I am doing. Look for a meaning to each photo rather than fire off a few hundred and hope. The transition to film have been a life saver for me. It’s forced me to work harder, think more, and expose my feelings more in my photos. It’s helped me to find a voice in my work and to focus on my style.

It’s easier to hide behind a brand, behind a mask. If people don’t like what you do, it doesn’t matter, it’s only business. But it’s hard to put yourself out as yourself. The images I shoot that mean something to me, represent me. So if people don’t like them, it feels personal. But I’ve come to realize that you have to take the risk. You have to be yourself and say something. Otherwise you might as well just download stock photos from the internet and pretend.

So. I’m putting the old branding in the back of the drawer and focusing on being me. Just me and my photos. And hopefully something interesting to say.

From now on, I’m Simon Chester.

This is one of my favourite images I’ve taken. It represents everything I want to achieve (at the moment anyway!)

Four from the street

December 12, 2017

Back on the street, this time with a roll of Kodak T-Max and my 50mm Zeiss Planar. I have been playing around with my 28mm but if I want to actually shoot, it’s always the 50mm. I also have a new light meter (stole my wife’s old iPhone) so the exposures are better.

I shot this roll at iso 800 and then developed for 12 min in Rodinal 1:50 as per the Massive Development Chart.

The incalculable joy of riding a bicycle.

The women in my life watch, always watch.

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space, you can bend time also” Margaret Atwood

Playing with colour

August 23, 2017 in Artistry

I am a black and white shooter. There. I’ve said it. I love black and white. I love the timeless, structural nature of it. I love the gradation away into darkness. Colour has always felt cheaper. Too close to the humdrum of daily existence. No drama. Plus, I have always been bored with my own colour photos and struggled to find an anchor to the image.

Recently I watched one of the Art of Photography videos on the Photo Assignments. If you haven’t watched Ted Forbes video’s I highly recommend them. Watch one, make notes, go shoot.

This video opened my eyes a bit to the possibilities of color - https://youtu.be/bAWZ9PtZ4uw

In black and white photography, I focus on separation of the subject (or subjects) from the rest of the world to bring focus and drama to the photo. Using framing, depth of field, and a few other techniques I try to draw the viewer’s eye to the purpose of the photo. Maybe colour can be one more technique? By using tension in the colour palette of the photo (along with framing, depth of field, etc) the subject can be further separated from the rest of the photo.

For this series I focused on red. I mostly live in Vancouver where there is a lot of green, so red seems to “pop” more for me.

Red Series #2

Red Series #3

Red Series #4

Red Series #5

Red Series #6

Red Series #7

Semana Santa

April 18, 2017

Holy week in Spain is a very big deal. Semana Santa (Holy Week) starts on Palm Sunday and each day different brotherhoods emerge from their churches to perform penance. They walk through the streets wearing capirotes (the conical heads) and silks to cover their faces, traditionally hiding the identities of the penitents.

Here in Andalucia the parades are a very big deal and the streets are packed. The brotherhoods walk from their church to the cathedral and back. They carry giant Pasos (floats) which take 20 to 24 strong men to lift and walk with thorough the cobbled streets.

What the hell is an artist?

April 01, 2017 in Artistry

My background is science. Microbiology to be specific. Now I spend my professional life listening to complex problems and trying to help people navigate their way through to an acceptable computer solution to those problems. Although the problems can be messy and ill defined, success (and failure) usually is a little easier to tie down. You know when a job is done well, when a customer is happy. You complete a project and tie it up with a nice little bow and move on.

But what about photography? How do you know when you are doing well? How do you measure success? What is success?

When I approach a technical problem I usually start from the end. I imagine what the end state will look like and then work back to where we currently are. It’s like doing a maze on a paper. If you start from the end all the options fall away and you are left with a clear path back to the start. My wife calls this cheating. I don’t know if I agree with that.

So let’s start there. What is success with photography? Riches? World renown? A little positive feedback?

Actually I haven’t got a clue. Maybe a little bit of all? Maybe none of the above. And if I don’t know I can’t use my normal process. I’m an analyst at sea, no starting point.

In this case it is easy to try and think of your whole life as an end point and forget there is the slight matter of living life. Even if I could say my end goal is to be a famous photographer, I’d have to get there. And to do that my photos would have to not only be good, but they’d have to have value. No paintings of dogs playing cards please!

So then what about another problem solving technique? Find different but similar problem space and look for solutions there? This is a bit of a hackneyed example, but let’s talk about Mozart and Beethoven for a moment. Both produced transcendent works of art. Both look impressive in brass statues. Both have inspired countless humans since their times. But they were remarkably different as artists.

By all accounts Mozart was a truly unique individual. The music flowed effortlessly, intuitively. A stone cold child prodigy. Enough to make mere mortals weep. It makes me sad to say, I’m no Mozart.

But what of Beethoven? Someone who wrestled huge gorillas of self doubt and torment. Someone who had to make endless mistakes to move forward an inch. Now there is someone to take inspiration from.

Maybe an artist is really a process. Not an end state but (trying not to sound like a pretentious fool here) the progression and development of a set of skills. Maybe it is not grandiose delusions of fame but small incremental steps. Slow improvement and investigation into technique and history. Maybe art is not the product but the steps the work that go into creating it.

Everything is interesting on the way to lessons

Finding a voice

March 28, 2017 in Artistry

To start with, photography is easy. Get a camera take some photos, get a bit better. Life is good and gratification flows. Then it starts to get more complicated. You start to want to improve. You compare your photos against images that define a generation and obviously they come up short. So your ego takes a knock, but you soldier on, and you start to research more. Hours are lost to the internet.

And then it seems so many of us get caught by reviews of cameras. Of flashes, lenses, light meters. In the search to become better photographers we take a wrong turn and obsess about gear, like that is the route to good photos. It’s easy to see why on reflection. Technology is a physical thing. You can compare one piece to another. You can say this sensor has a higher resolution than this sensor. This shutter is faster than that shutter. On the internet review and technology sites abound.

And so you get lost in the world of technology but your photos don’t really improve much. They just become technically better versions of the same boring photos that you could take before. Higher resolution. More space in your hard drive. More time invested in a death spiral of technology, but no worth in the photos you produce. And no gratification.

I think everyone who becomes interested in being a photographer runs this risk. I know I have wasted years on obsessing about which is the perfect camera and system. And wasted a very large amount of money too but still failed to be satisfied about my own progression as a photographer.

The problem is it’s easy to look at technology but hard to look at artistry.

Artistry begins with imagining what you want to say, what you want to achieve. With an understanding of your materials. With research into other works, both in your field and outside of your field. It develops through repetition and refinement. But it begins with finding a voice. And that voice isn’t on the internet, and it certainly isn’t on a review site.

A little Spanish street photography

March 28, 2017 in Street Photography

After moving my family half way round the world for a few months and navigating endless paperwork, I am finally a little more settled. I’m waiting for development chemicals to be delivered for black and white film photography, so in the mean time I’m shooting digital.

One of my justifications for my foray into film photography was to make myself a better photographer by having to go back to basics and focus on producing good clean images to work with. I noticed the change in the way I approach street photography with my digital camera. No more spray and pray, I take more time looking for the photo and imaging (also call pre-visualising) the photo before I pull the trigger.

Shooting in Granada is wonderful. So many people, so much to see. I’m like a kid in a candy store. With M&Ms in my pocket!