Fuji X | MiKS Media Photography

Sunrise on Long Island

by Mac Sokulski | Dec 28, 2015 | Fuji Landscapes, Fuji X, Landscape

After a busy time of Christmas preparations, we finally have some time to continue with our New York trip. We already covered our day in Manhattan and Central Park. Now it’s time for what we love doing best.

Our good friend Dominick, a great landscape photography artist, took us to his favorite spots on Long Island. It was a full day from sunrise to sunset of beaches, waves, and beautiful landscapes.

After the long walk through Manhattan, we managed to get up early enough not to miss the sunrise. The beach was already busy, with fishermen. The Atlantic was quiet, and peaceful, and so was the mood. There were Fuji cameras, Sony cameras, tripods and sand. Everyone was fishing, in one way or the other. At the end of the day, I think everyone came away with great catch.

Oh and remember to click on the images to get a much nicer view 🙂

New York Part 2: Central Park

by Mac Sokulski | Dec 9, 2015 | Fuji Landscapes, Fuji X, Landscape, Nature, People

I figured that Central Park should get it’s own post. As we both love landscape photography, it was an easy choice. It’s a beautiful place, and hard to imagine it’s location, among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Coming from western Canada, where fall has long past, and the world turned to gray and brown, it was such a relief to still see magnificent colors present. It brought immediate memories of childhood days. I believe this has made Central Park, even more special.

Photographically, it’s a paradise. One could spend days there, photographing nature, wildlife, and people. If you are carrying a camera in Central Park, be prepared to be asked to take photos of strangers. The bigger the camera the more you will be asked. Carrying a little Fuji with me, I guess I wasn’t considered a serious enough photographer, but a friend that was with us, and his big DSLR camera, was asked constantly. So here is an advice, if you want to be left in peace, don’t bring a DSLR camera to Central Park.

While taking pictures, we tried not to duplicate ourselves, and it wasn’t easy to do. Here is what we came up with from the brief, albeit memorable visit.

Remember to click on the images to see them in full glory 🙂 Enjoy.

New York Part 1

by Mac Sokulski | Nov 20, 2015 | Art, Fuji X, Urban

We made it… we can scratch off the Big Apple from our bucket list, at least a little. A spur of the moment decision, a weekend in New York. That’s all it was. Having 2.5 days in New York and try to fit as much as we can into it, was crazy. But we are like that, a little nuts. We hoped for a nice sunrise or sunset (we got both), and fairly good day in the city. The best part though was meeting new people. Dominick and his whole wonderful family was a wonderful host, even though we invaded their home, and wrecked a little havoc in their lives. They are beautiful people, that we will be in debt to, for a very long time. Thank you Dominick and thank you Niki, Zac and Kaden.

First day in Manhattan. What a day. Grand Central Station, Times Square, Central Park, the subway (and no sandwiches there, just lots of people), Brooklyn Bridge and a bit of Brooklyn. An adventure of a life time. Really. Apart for sore necks from craning at the hugeness of it all, and really sore feet from walking about 19km, we were happy. Since we were all walking together, it was difficult to create very different images. I was concentrating on the fisheye look, while Kasia took more conservative approach. We both really like the fisheye look, the distortions that this lens creates. Even though, it’s not an easy lens to use, to create something interesting. The ease of it, is that for the most part, it’s a lens you set and forget. Because of it’s wide angle view, you can set it for 5.6-8 aperture, and infinity focus, and just point and shoot. Done.
Yes, of course there are tons of things to see, but if you are strapped for time you make choices, and see the iconic places, and try to replicate the iconic images that everyone makes. So that’s what we did. It’s our memories after all 🙂

Once we got to the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, we met up with Antonio Rosario from Switch2Manual podcast. I’ve been listening to that podcast for a while now, and discovered Antonio’s street photography, which is quite amazing. So since we were in New York, why not meet up, as he puts it, in “meatspace”. So we did, and I run into a bit of a problem. Because I was chatting so much, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the fisheye lens. It must have moved off it’s infinity setting, or the aperture switched, because most of the New York city scapes from Brooklyn Park, were just slightly out of focus. I blame it on being tired, excited, and a complete twat, photographically speaking of course 🙂

It’s really hard not to write more, as the whole day of adventuring with cameras in great company through New York, is a trip of a life time. I just wished we had more time to discover the city better, and spend more time on creating better photographs. Even though we have never met Dominick, nor Antonio before, we chatted and emailed before, and it felt like meeting old friends again.

We shot a lot of images so I thought it would be good to combine our images into a single post. Good luck finding Kasia’s Sony and my Fuji images :)…. there will be more, much more in next post. Remember to click on the images for full size.

When things don’t go as planned and Fuji comes to the rescue.

by Mac Sokulski | Nov 4, 2015 | Art, Boudoir, Fuji X, People

On the onset of this little write up, just want to warn that the images attached to this post are not really safe for work 🙂

Had a great opportunity to shoot with Kate again. She’s an amazing model to work with. Her understanding of poses, and light is second to none. We planned an outside setting for the shoot, but it being autumn in Alberta, the weather did not cooperate. That’s one thing that went wrong.

Second I wanted to try flash photography with film, and not having a proper light meter… you know the rest. It simply didn’t work. Eyeballing the light and manual camera settings is for pros, not people like me. So that’s another thing that failed. Not completely, but it wasn’t as good as I have envisioned.

Thirdly, my Fuji XT1, which I brought as a backup to the film cameras, decided to be stubborn and refused to work with my lights. I use radio poppers as a remote transmitter, and because some silly setting inside Fuji menu it just refused to work. There is certain criteria you have to have for Fuji XT1 to operate strobes. The camera cannot be on silent mode, it cannot have electronic shutter enabled etc. etc. WHY?? The flash should work anyway. You might get terrible results, but it should still work. Nope, not this time.

Even though it refused to work with speed lights, it got it’s magic back, being able to work in very low light situation very very well. The combination of the the excellent Fuji 56mm f1.2 lens and great high ISO performance of Fuji XT1, finished the session successfully.

There was a lot more things that failed, like putting the film in the camera backwards, not being able to focus properly etc. etc. Yes lack of experience… it was a great learning session though. Thankfully Fuji came to the rescue. Oh and one little tip… when in doubt push the film while developing. It’s not easy to recover underexposed images.

A year ago… Photography Reflections.

by Mac Sokulski | Aug 20, 2015 | Fuji X, Macro, Nature

I have been slacking. Mostly because …. I guess I’m lazy. I do have a backlog of images that are asking politely to be posted somewhere… maybe someone will like them? What if no one really cares? Will that have an impact? Should it have an impact? Should our creativity be influenced by someone liking or disliking or simply not caring about the images we create? There are so many of us “photographers”. Our images get lost in the deluge of other equally wonderful work from others. We get discouraged, or yet a simple “LIKE” from a photographer we know and admire can send us on a pixel fueled high. We want it, we crave it… and then we drop.

It’s funny how we call ourselves photographers, yet most of us are nothing but glorified point and shooters. Glorified, because we got expensive gear. We love our gear, we talk about it, we dismiss it’s faults and problems, and defend it vigorously on the social webs. In this whole process we often forget, to create, share, and love… our images.

I recently heard a conversation a man had about his Leica Q, which he just bought. It was an eye opener to listen how he dismissed the glaring faults, as trivial, like he was desperately trying to justify to himself, the very steep price of the camera and the impulse buy. Hey, it’s Leica, so it must must must be grrrrreat! It’s sad really.

I do the same with a lot of my posts. Currently I use Fuji cameras for most of my work. It fits me just fine. Why do I talk about Fuji so much, because I like the camera, I like the company, and to be perfectly honest here, I’m doing it for attention. Look what I can do with my little Fuji camera!!! My wife shoots with an older Sony NEX camera. I’m often in awe at what she creates. Would she be able to do the same with, I don’t know, a Fuji or Leica, or Canon or some other brand? I would say, definitely yes. Then again I’m biased and my opinion doesn’t count 🙂

The point of this post is really, enjoy the gear you have… what ever it is. Make it work for you, and create, share and love.

P.S. Fuji is still the best 🙂

P.P.S This post is brought to you by both Sony and Fujifilm. Which image came from which camera, I’ll let you guess.

Fuji and Aurora Borealis or Marriage Advice

by Mac Sokulski | Jul 15, 2015 | Fuji Landscapes, Fuji X, Landscape

It is a dangerous territory I wade in. As my wonderful wife, Kasia, blogs here, and reads my posts. She’s also a photographer. This arrangement has a lot of pluses, like being able to bounce ideas off each other, or being able to just go shoot northern lights, at the spur of the moment at 2 am in the morning. What are we doing up at 2 am, you may ask, well I’ll just leave that alone…. or I’ll phrase it this way…. we are editing pictures :D. It helps a lot that our kids are old enough and responsible enough that, that we know we won’t come back to a burned out house. Another huge plus, is that we learn from each other, be it camera settings for a particular situation, or post processing. Funny enough we don’t pat each other on the back. Kasia is my harshest critic. She can very quickly kill my excitement, by quickly flipping through my latest images, and don’t say a word.

As for minuses, we like to take pictures of the same things. So if we go for a little road trip, we usually come back with very similar images, even though she still shoots with Sony NEX cameras. I thought of introducing Kasia, to Fuji, but then I thought about lenses and having to fight over them (I’m bigger, but I would still loose), eventual silent treatments, sleeping on the couch…. nah way to complicated. So we have a Fuji / Sony photo marriage with a sprinkle of Canon for good measure.

Our latest Aurora trip is a perfect example. We both took our fish-eye lenses, one for Fuji and one for Sony. The advantage of those is that they are manual lenses, and it’s easy to set them to infinity focus. Also the focus by wire lenses common on most mirrorless cameras, do not have focus infinity markings on them. Fuji to their advantage has few very good lenses that allow for this. Also another advantage Fuji has over Sony, is the distance scale on the LCD display. Going by that scale you can approximate the infinity focus of a lens even if there are no markings. Sony and their NEX lenses do not have this, making them all but useless at night. Well the results of the trip are pretty obvious. Here are Kasia’s images of Aurora from that night, and mine are below. Images are almost identical. Well….. Fuji makes them better, but that’s only because it’s Fuji 🙂

…. and I guess I will be posting next time from the dog house…. barq barq

P.S. Honey, you know I love you 🙂

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