Stacey’s new camera.

As much as I love real film and real film cameras (I shot my first two features with an Aaton LTR 16mm film camera), I rarely shoot film anymore. Because (1) digital is pretty good these days, and (2) film (and film processing) is really expensive.

Stacey is more of a stills shooter than me. She’d been kind of thinking about maybe getting a new stills camera. Which got me reading up on stills cameras. I asked Chris Mitchell what he liked these days, and he started singing the praises of Fuji’s digital cameras. I started looking at Fuji’s options and talked Stacey into getting a Fujifilm X-T30 II. Aside from taking good photos, it’s just a good-looking camera — it is silver and black and has a charming retro-but-not-too-retro look.

We’ve been in Iceland for the past few days, and I must admit that I have been using Stacey’s new camera a lot more than she has. And I really, really like it.

I assume you can just shoot regular “raw” photos with this camera and then tweak the color settings in post. But I have been using the camera’s “film simulation” setting, which basically emulates a bunch of different old-school Fuji film stocks. Stuff like Astia (low-contrast color), classic chrome, hi-contrast pro negative, and Eterna (Fuji’s cinema film stock). My favorites, at the moment, are Acros, a black-and-white stock (that includes a red filter to make black-and-white skies look darker and more dramatic), and Velvia/vivid, a color-saturated stock.

On top of picking a virtual film stock, you can also add your choice of virtual film grain emulation. There are, of course, all kinds of analog film color and grain effects that you can add to your photos in Photoshop (or Instagram, for that matter). But it’s fun to just commit to a look while you are shooting and then living with what you get. Not that you can’t go into Photoshop and tweak these “pre-baked” photos you’re taking with the X-T30. But it’s fun that you don’t have to do that. The photos come out of the camera looking pretty darn great. I’m not bragging about my photography — I just mean the photos have nice, film-like, color and grain and whatnot.

I’ll probably have more to say about this camera as I learn more about it. In the meantime, here are a few photos I shot with the Fuji in Iceland (which, as countries go, is about as photogenic as they come).