Hi Fujifilm Family!
For a while, I was doing it wrong.
Not the photos themselves, but the way I looked at them.
Every shot had to fit.
Fit the feed. Fit the story format. Fit the aspect ratio. Fit the algorithm.
And I hate that.
Because a good photo doesn’t always fit.
It breathes. It stretches. Sometimes it needs more air. More space.
A 6:7, a 1:1, a full landscape pano. Anything but vertical.
I don’t want to make reels.
I don’t want to turn every photo into a slideshow.
I want to take pictures. Real ones. For myself.
If that means they don’t get shared as much, fine.
Maybe they don’t belong on a phone screen anyway.
Maybe they live in a book. Or on a wall.
Or just in a folder I come back to when I need to feel something.
This website gives me that space.
No crop police. No swipe addiction.
Just image after image, as I saw them, how I framed them. 🖼️
🎥 A Filmmaker’s Camera
To that end, I finally made my decision about which analog film camera to buy.
It took a while. I was all over the place.
At one point, I almost left Fujifilm behind entirely — for a Nikon F3, or maybe a Leica M4. 😅
But then I found it.
I’m a filmmaker first and foremost.
This photography journey, especially street photography, is a big passion, but it’s still a hobby. I don’t do it for work. I don’t want to.
I do it for the love of photography.
And what I love about filmmaking is that cinematic vibe.
That wide, stretched, golden-era-of-Hollywood feel.
Not the Sony A7R, 16:9, zoom-lens, YouTube content-boy aesthetic.
I want Freddie Young (the cinematographer of Lawrence of Arabia) as if he were shooting strangers on the street.
So I landed on the Hasselblad XPAN.
(BUT THAT’S NOT A FUJIFILM CAMERA, HOW DARE YOU, UNSUBSCRIBE!)
Here’s the thing: the XPAN is just a European rebrand of the Fujifilm TX1.
Same camera. Same magic.
The TX1 is harder to find here, and the XPAN happened to be available in a store, not far from where I live.
So for all intents and purposes, it’s still a Fujifilm camera.
Just with a Hasselblad wrapper.
Self Portrait with the XPAN
And now I’m free.
And I took out my XPAN with a Fujifilm 400 film roll and walked around.
The results are... varied.
Some frames came out slightly overexposed something I’d read Fujifilm 400 can do but I wasn’t yet proficient or confident enough to lower my ISO and shoot faster shutter speeds.
Still, a couple of these came out real nice. ✨
I’ll show you some that turned out nice first
I like these from my roll
And then some… I wish I did better on including the framing. I wish I had more XPAN experience, enough to know I needed to stop down to avoid that overexposure in the first place. And I sometimes just need to get a bit closes.
Okay bye