Small gear thoughts (with lots of distracting photographs)

I made it a goal this year to purposefully try and think about different types gear.  I decided trying a small carry everywhere camera, and a large format pinhole camera.

This is about the small camera.  More specifically, this a bit of a retrospective of nearly a year with my X100s.

I have taken it Tennessee, and I have even written a bit about it before.  But, I have carried it with me nearly everywhere I went everyday since I bought it.

This had an immediate effect.  I stopped using my cell phone ( as much ) for taking pictures.  I started taking pictures of my kids in restaurants with it.  I used it to document such things as metro's incompetence, dinner, random things that caught my eye because of color or light, etc.  Yes, this was all stuff I had done before with the cell phone, but, at least from a technical quality point of view-- these are much better than if I had used a cell phone.

I can imagine some of you are thinking, yeah, but you own dSLRs you could carry one of those around and do the same thing.  Yes, I *could*, and I did carry an SLR around nearly every day for a year or two prior to picking up the small camera.  But, I didn't use it nearly as much.  In fact, I think the only good it did me was make my back stronger.  It certainly didn't help fill up my picture library with high quality images of everyday moments.  There are a lot of reasons for that, none particularly good.  It was effort to get an SLR out of a bag, my SLR attracts attention, its pretty loud, and did I mention it attracts attention?  In any event, none of those things matter to me if photographing is my primary focus, but for a quick shot it is paramount.

I have also used it for more staged and/or serious pictures too.  It works very well there too.  I tend to work pretty methodically and slowly making those kind of pictures, so the speed disadvantage an x100 has compared to a dSLR doesn't impact me.

This has made me consider picking up one of Fuji's interchangeable lens X-cameras and potentially selling all my SLR gear.  Unfortunately, there are a few things I do that would fall flat if I tried that, and I don't want to support two camera systems.  One is expensive enough.  But, the thought still lingers.

I doubt there are too many people out there that are still on the fence about buying one of these little cameras-- but if you are go try one.  It looks like a an updated model will be out soon so you have 3 generations to choose from!

Okay, this may have been written to give me a reason to put up a lot of different photographs from the year that don't really warrant their own post, and don't easily fit with anything else.