A family walk along the Thames in black and white

A few weekends ago my mother came down to stay with us (mostly to get her fix of seeing Alex, which is fair enough). We managed to get out and about both days, going to Borough Market for lunch on the Saturday followed by a walk along the south bank and then heading back into town on Sunday for a roast dinner at Hawksmoor Seven Dials (surprisingly very child-friendly).

With an extra pair of helping hands to deal with combinations of baby, baby bags and buggy I managed to take a few photos with the X-T2 across both days.

Shooting in black & white

With the Fuji X-T2 I've been shooting JPEG+RAW and, thanks to a little push from the lovely new Acros film simulation, I've recently gone back to trying the technique of shooting with the camera in B&W mode even if I might edit the Raw in colour later. Other than being a nice base for street photography, seeing the scene in black and white through the viewfinder helps focus on where the light and contrast is in an image without colour distraction.

Shooting this way can help you spot the things that really stand out in a scene and compose for the light. It's far from sure-fire and I have cycled through Acros, Classic Chrome and Provia for my film simulation in the viewfinder and for Jpegs depending on the environment and style I'm shooting.

Anyway, long story slightly shorter: taking all these photos in Acros got me back on a B&W processing kick which I haven't done for quite a while. Acros itself is gorgeous but I'd also been reading the updated version of Thomas Fitzgerald's Lightroom guide for Fujifilm and Thomas included with the updated ebook some of his Fuji Lightroom presets.

Thomas has got some lovely filmic tone curves to go with the Acros simulation and most of the photos here started by applying his Faux Film FFX 10 +V preset, then working on from there. Patrick Laroque, another Fuji shooter, wrote a good overview of film-like tone curves around the same time I was working on these files which is worth checking out. Patrick has a distinct moody, filmic style to his photos that I've enjoyed for a while now.

Here are a few more photos of the family from that week: