Another day out with Fuji X-E1

Border track near Green Mountains covered with the red flowers of Illawarra Flame tree | Fuji X-E1 & XF18-55mm

I went to Green Mountains section of Lamington national park on Saturday. I decided to go by inland route through the Mt Lindesey highway, took a wrong turn at roundabout on Tamborine St / Mundoolin Rd after I was confused by big residential development along Mundoolin Rd but eventually made it to O'Reilly's (another name for Green Mountains).

As during the previous walk, I had the Fuji X-E1 with XF18-55mm lens and a small Manfrotto digital tripod. The weather was really good, cloudy but not rainy, and it was quiet, so many photos were taken with the camera mounted on tripod. Most of such shots were done at iso 200 through a polarizer.

As during my first outing with the camera I found the autofocus adequate for my needs. It may not autofocus from first attempt on clouds or very low contrast landscapes but it can be done. The tricky part are scenes as twigs in front of branches but reducing the focusing area does help in such situations.

The battery was flat when the tripod plate was mounted on camera. Maybe in the future it would be possible to have either tripod socked in the middle of the camera, or put the battery compartment door on the side, not at the bottom. When camera goes to sleep, it cancels the timer. I ended up to use 2 minutes "sleeping time" instead of 30 seconds because 30 seconds sometimes is not enough for a tripod work. This obviously, drain the battery. BTW, it seem that the camera clean the sensor avery times it goes to sleep, so I switched off an automatic sensor cleaning. I got about 200 shots per battery, not really great. For long trips I will need several spare batteries. Next time I will take either lens hood or big hat: even indirect light going into the lens washes out upper part of the image. I have the same issue with DSLR. Couple times the camera ended up in a plastic bag because of light rain. Olympus lenses are weather-sealed, so I would not even bother with a few raindrops. Some switches can be turned accidentally, so it is good idea to keep an eye on aperture setting and OIS status.

Some other images from this walk are posted on flickr. I did a minor editing in GIMP, (levels, unsharpen mask etc). Everything was shot as JPEG.

Gondwana relict, Nothofagus moorei, Antarctic Beech   | Fuji X-E1 & XF18-55mm