Big Mistake...Taking 2 new cameras on holiday!

So, having decided to join the growing army of mirrorless camera users, I purchased the Sony RX1Rii, which I have wanted to try out for a few years, and the Fuji XPro2, which I had wanted to return to since my early days trying out the XPro1.

So now the $64k question..Which camera to take on my upcoming trip?
Not unexpectedly, I couldn't decide, so I took both....big mistake!

We arrived in Dubai in the middle of Ramadan, and in the middle of the Dubai summer.

It's hot in Dubai any time, but especially hot in summer. Too hot to be stood around I the heat trying different camera settings, and certainly too hot for Jill to be bothered with her new camera (Panasonic Lumix GX9)

One of the points of going mirrorless was to reduce the weight of my carry around cameras.




So I immediately negated this benefit by carrying around not one, but two systems, including three lenses for the Fuji, a flash unit for the Sony, sunglasses, sunscreen cream, water, phone, wallet, etc, etc.

It was all too heavy, and too confusing trying to remember how to set up two completely new systems and menu structures..."which buttons do I press for AEL?".."How do I change focus points?"..."How do I change drive mode?"..."How does facial recognition work?"

The answer of course is different for each camera!!!

Slowly, but surely, I began to get the hang of the two new and very different systems. I also quickly decided that the Fuji with its 16mm F1.4 lens was better suited to the night and architectural photography I found myself shooting in the relative cool the Dubai evening.

I had also bought specially for this trip a Samyang 8mm Fisheye lens, for the Fuji, and I was keen to experiment with the peculiar field of view from this lens.

The lens was a manual focus only lens, which coupled with the need for manual aperture control meant that the lens was essentially a "dumb" piece of glass in front of the camera.

I knew that at 8mm there was almost no need to bother with focus, so I just set it to an "infinity" focus distance and tried my luck!

Mostly the Fisheye worked, and I was happy with the shots. It certainly enabled me to include all of the mighty Burj Khalifa in shot, whenever I photographed this magnificent tower (which was my desired intent)

 The grand, spacious (and cool!) shopping malls also showed up well withe fisheye lens. I was very pleased with these images, although I have yet to try the "Defish" software which is supposed to take away some of the obvious fisheye curvature.

I quite like the curvature in these images, so we will see later what effect this software has.

We were only in Dubai for 4 nights, stopping over on our way to England, but by the of day two I found myself almost always using the Fuji system, principally because of the flexibility that this system provided with interchangeable lenses.

The Fuji system, the Fisheye lens and 16mm lens were particularly suited to the type of images I found myself shooting in the heat of Dubai, so I hardly used the Sony

So I decided that when I got to England for the second part of the holiday I would use the Sony exclusively, to see if I could get comfortable with its ergonomics and controls, and also to see if the images it produced were indeed as detailed as I have been led to believe...

I also resolved to carry around only one system!

More of the images we both took in Dubai can be sen in the Dubai gallery on our website