Every year I try to go on a weeken trip with photographer friends. This year we decided on going to Paris. This wasn't our first trip to Paris so I have a pretty good comparison on my experiences from previous photo visits.

In the past I used to take a heavy full frame DSLR with a bunch of good lenses with me. It seems to me that the burden of owning great lenses is that you have to decide which lens to leave at home and what kind of graeat photo opportunities you might miss due to that.

Once I did lug most of my gear with me through the city all day long that I did realize that I missed more photo opportunities while changing lenses or due to the intimidation factor of the big camera and lens. So this year was the year to go light on gear and still bring back good photos!

This was the lens line up I took along on my last trip to Paris:

And this was my gear I took along this time: Fujifilm X10 and X-Pro 1 (plus the Fujinon XF 35mm lens that was already packed in my jacket's pocket at the time I took this photo :-)

My photographic mission on this trip was to use the X-Pro 1 for raw street photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson took many of his photos in Paris so this seemed like the perfect spot for me to give it a try. I converted most of these images from color into black & white in Adobe LightRoom 4.1

It was really easy to go around take photos almost unnoticed with the small and unobtrusive X-Pro 1

Framing and timing shots was really easy as I saw people walking into the scene before they were in the frame - thanks to the rangefinder style viewfinder of the X-Pro 1

I also found the color to black and white conversion to be quite eays in LR4

And just in case you are wondering, the X-Pro 1 is capable of color photos, too ;)

Over all the city travel and street photography experience with the X-Pro 1 was very pleasing. The weather ranged from rainy to sunny and hot and I only had a small and relatively light ThinkTank Retrospective bag with me all day. There were few occasions where I would have wished for a bit longer focal length, but on those occasions I pulled out the X10.

There's more to come from my Paris trip and I'll post some really cool Fujifilm X10 shots later...

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