A Day In The Life Of A Demo Camera: Test Shots With The Fujifilm GFX100

Herewith, a few out-of-the-box test shots with the, well, revolutionary **Fujifilm GFX100* (screw-the-manual and the quick-start guide, and while I’m at it, here’s to capitalization in headlines) exhibiting the recklessness implied by the preceding; images created amidst a delirium akin to the adrenalized mindstate of a teenager being given a Maserati to joyride — with neither a driver’s license nor supervising adult — stalling, stammering, grinding gears, clutch-pop bolt-outs, swerving around corners, and even hitting a few strides. I’ll be shooting some more images, and will have more to say about this camera, but for now, by way of a first foray, I’m posting shots (keepers and* clunkers, all my fault) from this triptych urban photo safari which lasted way less than an hour, beginning at The Whitney’s press preview for the “Making Knowing: Craft In Art, 1950–2019” exhibition, after which I spent a minute on the museum’s magical 6th floor, wherein resides its open-ended “The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 — 1965” which, as I’ve said before, they should make permanent, swapping out various works on a rotating basis, as it is a New York treasure, and one of this city’s gifts to the world, offering an insouciant and most inviting primer to all.

“Wish Sandwich: Hungry For Something More?” Tom Wesselman, “Still Life #36” (1964) Whitney Museum of American Art.

This always-welcome gallery-wander was immediately followed by yet another happenstance, completely impromptu photo shoot (like the “Winged Stranger By The East River” series) with a total stranger…near-verbatim paraphrasing: “Hey that’s a dynamite outfit; I’m shooting with this crazy new camera I’ve just unboxed, and don’t even know how to work — wanna take some pictures?” And off we went.

“Vivi in Furs (& A Denim Bucket Hat)” Model: Vivi, a stranger I asked to pose for me on the steps of The Whitney.

My afternoon concluded with a single shot taken when I, well, stopped into a church I passed along the way, finding myself inspired by silent, earnest pilgrims (though atheist, secular humanist I be), and realizing how, though sometimes heart-heavy, we humans can quite earnestly, via the mechanism and mystery of faith — remain soulfully hopeful, and thus resilient…and this profound, mortal resonance I witnessed these pilgrims bringing to a house of worship, and the transcendent fortification they derived from same…was enough to make this daydreamer, well, believe — if not in a deity, then, in its practical equivalent, namely: faith in god — and by god, I mean nothing more nor less (and no more nor less mysterious despite the absence of metaphysical leaps) than the word’s etymological essence, which perhaps suffices well and true for all, whether of a faith or not: that which is summoned.

“The Three Rich Magi”

Let’s hear it for New York — everyone should get to spend time doing this:

A young scholar, in earnest discovery, contemplation…indifferent to time, like an Early Cycladic sculpture. You go, kid.

Although heretofore, I’d never shot with a Fujifilm camera, my experience with this brand is humorously romanticized within a fascinating point in time: the early 80s, when I first started taking pictures at age sixteen for my high school yearbook. Although I had an unlimited supply of free film, paper, chemicals and dark room time (oh, when I think of the supplies we wasted in that darkroom: our idea of test strip was an 8X10 print!) I — just like Mark Ratner in Fast Times At Ridgemont High — fell in love with a girl who worked a photobooth and I would, whenever I hadn’t spent my Wendy’s paycheck at Tower Records, buy rolls of film from her. I asked for Fuji film because it was imported, and I thought that might make me seem sophisticated.

And like Mark Ratner, I never got her phone number, but I did really notice the difference that Fijucolor color film delivered versus the Kodak film I used, though to this day, those three little words: “Kodak Tri-X” bring a tear to my eye, as I think of the San Diego sun on hot, bright, pavement contrasted with cool angular shades, enveloping me in a Modernist aesthetic, as I took pictures of the nothingness of everything around me, long before I saw an Antonioni flick — and when I wasn’t stealing away and shooting architecture, I’d skip class and take exquisite candids, plus, I was assigned to shoot football games — coached by the winningest high school coach in US history, and a team that included Eric Allen, who went pro, and during his long NFL career delivered what is considered by many to be the greatest runback of an interception in NFL history, all with my beloved first 35mm camera, the Vivitar XV1 which, though not an expensive piece of gear, meant the world to me. Still does.

Anyway, shallow-focus that photo booth ’til it’s the macro-micro scale of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood — miniaturized-gargantuan, like those memories of my youth — and glide on the trolley past city block after city block ’til, unawares of how and when we took flight from our youth, we’re soaring through the cosmic infinitude of a neurogrid-universe/multiverse that is a mind’s recall, all that my existence was and is, fast-forwarding through the sometimes-smooth, sometimes-turbulent cloudy microfiche-movie of my life, back to the present, peeling rubber as we land, and arriving at the towering Fuji camera on my desk…I study its buttons and dials — like on any camera, Proustian Madeleines all.

More info on the Fujifilm GFX100 can be found HERE