Pete's Photography

I haven't written or posted anything photography related in quite a while - the first half of 2026 was very much focussed on preparing for our move to Japan. Now we are here and settled in as much as we can be whilst waiting for our New Zealand house to sell, I'm getting back into my Photography again.

Pearl Sun beach looking toward Mt Unzen

Scroll to the bottom if you want to skip straight to the photos, otherwise please continue reading.

Photos that don't see the light of day

I'd wager I'm not the only one with this problem. You go out, take some pictures, edit them and end up with some pictures that you think are great. What do you do with them? My Wife doesn't look at anything that isn't of our daughter, and my Blog posts will only use shots that are related to the topic at hand and those tend to be a more documentary style. The rest of my photos? They go into my filing system on my Mac and that's that. I re-review and cull occasionally as I set my standards higher and higher but still at this moment in time, it's 1,000 photos from the last year alone. What do I do with them?

I thought I would start this Photography series, aiming to post monthly. The idea is to post a handful of my favourite pictures from that month along with my thoughts and general photography ramblings. This first post though needs to do some catching up on the year so far though.

Camera GAS

My GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) went into absolute overdrive the closer we got to the move. Because I was giving up earning a good wage, I wanted to have my camera kit well sorted before moving whilst I still had the income to spend. This meant far too much second guessing and buying and selling cameras with increasing regularity and in the end it was all for naught as I've come full circle now that I'm in Japan.

I got so sick of worrying and analysing my gear that I gave up and decided to buy a Fujifilm GFX100RF. A medium format fixed lens camera with 102 megapixels to play with. No fretting over what lenses to buy or what lenses to take out, just a camera with a massive sensor and megapixels to crop. But then I panicked and doubted my sanity, and right before I moved I hastily traded it in on a compact Sony kit based around the A7CII. Once in Japan and using it more I got annoyed with it's poor auto white balance, especially using flash as it doesn't have a WB sensor. That and fighting to get skin tones right in post - which pushed me straight back into the arms of Nikon with a ZF and Z6III. Outstanding cameras in every way and outstanding glass - and much more affordable glass in Japan I might add compared to Sony. I chose the ZF and Z6III because they are not language locked like the newer Z5II. All Sony models are language locked in Japan by the way.

The idea behind the Nikon kit (aside from it stellar quality and particularly skin tones) was to cure my GAS by having 2 bodies for different uses and experiences with only 1 lens for each - the excellent 24-120 on the Z6III as the all-round option and the 40mm on the ZF for the fun, more compact and low light option. Naturally the itch for more lenses that you convince yourself you need has to be scratched and then you stress out deciding your priorities and then what camera and lenses to take out and what lenses. I've had enough of it and it sucks the joy out of photography.

So I put all my gear up for sale on Mercari (see my post here about that service) and purchased another Fujifilm GFX100RF - going back to what my instincts told me to do a few months ago. Less focus on gear, more focus on taking better photos and becoming a better photographer both in composition and post processing. More on the GFX next month.

Software decisions

With different camera systems comes different nuances with post processing. I simply wasn't happy with a lot of my photos from this year - I found it was to do with my editing software. Namely Photomator, with the reason being because it uses Apple's RAW converter which it turns out is not very good, despite me really liking the software and the Apple Photo's workflow as discussed in this post. The optical corrections are sub standard and the image quality is just poor when compared to proprietary RAW converters - I did extensive tests comparing images from Sony's Imaging Edge and Nikon's NX Studio. Images with the Apple RAW converter are incredibly lacking - I cannot put it into words but when you see the images side by side it is night and day in terms of the rendering and detail.

So without an editor that worked with Apple Photo's, I stopped using Apple Photos entirely and had to revise my entire workflow and file organisation, no easy task. I tested Sony's imaging edge and it's decent enough albeit rather limited - it was actually quite refreshing not having too many parameters to change on an image, and the image quality is great. It has basic cataloging features too that are plenty for me and perhaps you too. The app is a bit clunky though, but it is perfectly capable if you can work within its limitations. It costs nothing to try!

Nikon's NX Studio on the other hand is a more fully-featured editor (and is also free). It has some pretty advanced colour tools that if you wish can be used to make in-camera recipes as well as a whole host of conventional editing tools both advanced and basic. The cataloging is similar to Imaging Edge and I like it's within the same App and you can even backup images directly to Nikon's cloud service 'Nikon Image Space' which gives you 20gb of free storage and is great for hosting and sharing albums such as this one. NX Studio is a must try if you are a Nikon shooter - the rendering of the RAW files is unmatched, particular when it comes to colours.

Still, I wanted something a bit snappier in terms of both performance and editing efficiency - how quickly I can get an image to my liking. I'm against subscriptions and had been eyeing up the one-time purchase of Capture One for a while before I stumbled across DXO Photolab 9. DXO has the reputation of outstanding RAW conversion and denoising. The feature set in terms of editing and cataloguing are surprisingly similar to NX Studio, but it's a nice and more modern UI with better performance and some extra quality of life improvements. There's a million reviews online, and they offer a free 30 day trial so all I can say is give it a go. The denoising with Deep Prime XD3 is unreal, and the Deep Prime 3 RAW conversion just pulls out so much detail from your files. I added the Film Pack 8 (also available for trial) for the film simulations as the number of options is great, and makes edits faster than doing complex colour work.

The one fatal flaw with DXO Photolab? Highlight control. Most of my time in Japan so far has been the rainy season with it's dull grey skies followed by weeks of endless sunshine and clear blue skies. It wasn't until very recently when we experienced some bright cloudy days that I needed to balance out my skies and I really struggled. In LR or C1 you just pull the highlight slider down and that generally does it. In DXO PL9, the highlight slider pulls down mid tones as well, meaning you have to wrestle with about 4 different sliders and maybe the tone curve and still not get the result you would expect from just using the highlight slider in LR.

With my recent acquisition of a Fujifilm GFX100RF, I also have the free version of Capture One for it. Although it's a basic version lacking many features that DXO has, I will do some extensive head-to-head testing to see what I will use as my primary editor. I can tell you right now though, for low light images, DXO's noise reduction all the way, as the free version of C1 has no noise reduction whatsoever. More C1 vs DXO next month.

Less waffle, more photos.

Here are some of my favourites from June and July in Japan. We haven't been getting out much, so mostly shots from the local neighbourhood and places close by. I'm quite pleased with them considering multiple cameras and software packages used in the last 2 months.

Click on the images to view them larger, though I have downscaled them all quite a bit.

I hope you enjoy!