Thomas Menk

One week with the Fujifilm X-Pro1 | Graham Merritt

As I work in the Photographic industry, I did my bi-annual stint at Photokina earlier this year. It is a long and very busy show, with, as it turns out, both an upside and a downside. The upside is that you get to meet, and chat to, many photographers and photography enthusiasts from different countries and walks of life, with equally varied opinions and viewpoints on their equipment.The downside is that this almost always end up costing me money, as a group of strangers enthusing about something is a surefire way to spark my interest. I arrived in Cologne this year with a vague hankering for something new, for something to renew my purely amateur interest in purely amateur image making. I used to own a hasselblad X-Pan (my first proper camera in fact) and I have never found anything since that gave such enjoyment or satisfaction to use. I left Cologne this year with a complete Fuji X-Pro1 outfit, having heard nothing but good reviews, along with various comparisons to my beloved X-Pan, and having gone very slightly mad during the week long show and plainly forgotten the value of english currency. So do I regret this act of spontaneity, this involuntary emptying of my bank account? Not at all, and here’s why. The Fuji is an absolute gem. I have had this week off work and have been out three times to give the new camera a work out…..