Black and White In A Shopping Mall

A test run in monochrome street pushing ISO

It’s not often I venture into civilisation at the moment. Being anchored where we are means we’re two hours away from town, and that’s after arranging a local fisherman to pick us up from our boat. We therefore provision every two weeks and, since we share the ride with others, I don’t get the opportunity to flex my street photography passion. That said, I always take a camera with me so during this latest visit I made the others wait at the coffee shop while I wandered Epicentrum shopping mall for half an hour.

The camera was the Fujifilm XE2S, the lens a 27mm (40mm equivalent), and the film simulation Monochrome. I wasn’t concentrating too much on my camera settings, flitting between auto aperture and occasionally auto shutter speed, and then manual.

I do have the camera set at a maximum ISO of 1600 though. This being an older sensor, low light performance isn’t great. That said, the digital noise on the Fujifilm does render quite nicely. Nicer, in fact, than my more modern Sony, although these two cameras are so different it’s unfair to compare them.

It does mean, however, that images can’t be pushed too much in Adobe Camera Raw, and since I didn’t want to run these through denoising, I just went with pretty much what came out the camera, minus a couple of tweaks.

Noise in the whites of the walls doesn’t look so bad

It’s an interesting exercise going to town with a camera that has its limitations. Despite the mall being brightly lit, I wasn’t after fast moving shots. I was trying to avoid hitting that ISO 1600 limit while maintaining a fast-enough shutter speed.

This often meant opening up the aperture, and since I wasn’t scale focusing today, I was relying on the rather clumsy auto focus. These are just excuses though. Although I’ve posted a few notes on the XE2S, the truth is I’m still fairly unfamiliar with it.

It’s not a camera I’d use for the kind of unposed, fast street portraiture I do, but this isn’t a bad thing. Slowing down and understanding that I was less likely to achieve the aforementioned meant I could instead concentrate on patterns and contrasts.

I don’t look at the world in black and white enough. If you’re familiar with my photography, you know I love colour, so this half hour wander in a glitzy mall full of angles, lights and shadows was a nice little venture into monochrome.

I enjoyed photographing the mundane. In terms of subject matter, shopping malls don’t exactly provide the frenetic and garish subjects I’m normally used to capturing on my travels, but this is a positive in terms of creativity. It forces me to look somewhere new and different for inspiration.

Selfie

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