Getting out and about with a new baby (and taking photos)

Our son, Alex, was born 4 weeks ago today. As I'm sure most parents know, it's been a whirlwind few weeks: amazing and exhausting at the same time.

We have actually managed to leave the house on a few occasions already—we've been out to places nearby for lunch with visiting family—and this weekend my brother and his wife came to visit when we had our longest trip out of the house by far!

We drove into Greenwich for lunch at Bill's and the rain turned to bright sunshine as we ate so we then went for a walk and ended up sitting in Greenwich Park for an hour or so. In the late afternoon we had a first meetup with our NCT group since all our babies were born and it was so nice to see them all and especially meet all the cute new babies.

I even managed to take the Fuji X-T10 along for the ride and take some photos (the small leather neck strap I have on the X-T10 hangs perfectly on our Bugaboo, above).

Camera talk

The X-T1, having served me brilliantly for nearly 2 years, has been sent off to Wex in exchange for a pre-order on the new X-T2 which I'm very excited about. In the meantime the X-T10 remains—as an extremely capable stand-in before it returns to second camera status. I think I'll even get the old-faithful X100 out for an outing or two on my journeys to work.

Tomorrow I'm over at Facebook for most of the afternoon and then heading back to the office if there's time to shoot a quick cover photo for Funding Circle's engineering blog. The engineers have come up with a scene they want to capture, so here's hoping we can make it work. Thanks to Fujifilm's laudable practice of putting the same sensor in most of their cameras in each 'generation', I have no problems at all using the X-T10 rather than the X-T1: image quality will be identical. The X-T10 is a stunningly good-value camera and I'm interested to see if/when Fujifilm updates it following the X-T2 launch.

Photography with a newborn

Unsurprisingly, my photography output has fallen off a cliff as I've had more important things to think about after Alex's birth. I've taken a load of photos of Alex himself, almost entirely on my iPhone, which has been an interesting turn of events as I've never previously been able to get a good feeling about using the iPhone for photography. Clearly people like Dan Rubin are able to produce excellent results from phone cameras but I just can't get excited about taking pictures with one. And if you can't get excited about using your camera, you're not going to take good pictures and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I've often thought a qualifier is needed to the old adage, 'the best camera is the one you have with you': something like 'the best camera is the one you have with you and like using'.

Anyway, now I'm a doting father with his hands full, the need to document my son's early days has turned my iPhone 6 into an indispensable photographic tool that I've enjoyed using, so that when we were out in Greenwich yesterday I got the quite nice shot at the top of this post featuring-and-not-taken-by the Fuji. The motivation needs to come from somewhere and if the device can't provide it (as the Fujis do so well and the iPhone doesn't for me), people can fill in and Alex is having no trouble there.