If there’s anything that inspires me to grab the camera more often than normal, it’s Michigan’s fall colors. The problem is that fall is also often the time of year that I’m busy photographing portraits and beginning to get rather tired of lugging around a pack full of gear. When I set out to take a photo walk among the fall colors this year, I took a different approach and grabbed a compact camera instead: The Fujifilm GFX100RF.
The Fujifilm GFX100RF is a compact camera, yes, but it's better described as a luxury compact camera. The camera hides a 102MP medium format with a 35mm f/4 lens, all inside a fixed lens camera.
That larger sensor makes the GFX100RF a bit oversized for a compact camera, but carrying around the medium format compact still felt more liberating than using my mirrorless system with its heavy lenses.
Shooting the GFX100RF in my yard, at an orchard, and then on a fall hike was my first experience with the luxury compact camera, which I have borrowed only temporarily from Fujifilm. I knew from the start that the GFX100RF doesn’t have any zoom, but I was surprised at how well the digital zoom works. The resolution is high enough that you still get plenty of detail when using that in-camera crop, and, on RAW files, I could go in and re-crop or even rescue the full-resolution file if I want.
I did, however, miss my macro lens and the background compression that comes from using longer lenses. When I took this photo of the fall colors with the digital zoom, it didn’t bring the rainbow closer to the subject like a telephoto lens can. I went to grab my X-T4 with my 90mm lens to see if I could bring that background in closer, but by the time I swapped gear, the rainbow had dissipated.
While I may have missed my macro lens, the medium format sensor has a wider dynamic range that proved immensely useful in post. Many of my shots were in part shadow, part shade, and I was able to brighten up the shadows without losing the detail in the sky.
The only issue I had with this approach was that there was a bit of chromatic aberration in some shots, and editing for dynamic range exaggerated that purple fringing. Thankfully, fall leaves don’t turn purple, so I was able to ease that colored fringing a bit in Lightroom with the HSL sliders.
I turned my favorite hobbies into a career, and while that means I don’t dread going to work on Monday morning, my hobbies now sometimes feel more like, well, work. Switching it up with a compact camera makes photography feel more like a hobby again, however many pro features are crammed into the small body.
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