Yes, it’s really this colorful.

I went to dinner with my friend Alex, who I haven’t seen in a while. He used to run the Austin Photographic Society, a monthly photography lecture series, for eight years. After the photography meetings, we would have dinner at El Mercado on Burnet Road. I thought it would be fitting to meet at the same place, for old times sake.

I had my Fujifilm X-A2 with me, which I’ve talked about for the last couple of posts. It’s currently my top choice as an everyday carry around camera. While it’s considerably bulkier than my Canon G7X Mark II, which was my previous everyday camera, the Fuji’s image quality and the color are superior. If I don’t need a pants pocketable camera, like the G7X, then I’m more apt to use the Fuji.

I usually have the X-A2 paired with the Fuji 15-45mm kit lens. It has a useful focal length and unusually starts from a wide 22.5mm equivalent. It features an electronic zoom, which I don’t like, but it makes the lens smaller. It’s made of plastic and not nearly as sexy as my other well-built metal Fuji lenses. But, the 15-45mm had decent image quality, is compact, and was inexpensive.

The first photo is the view we had from where we sat, looking towards the entrance.

This is the view from the front door looking towards the back. I shot it as I left.

The outside is colorful too.

The lens has decent image stabilization, which really helps. It’s not as good as the Olympus in-body image stabilization but was adequate enough that I shot all photos at 1/15th of a second. Even with a slow f3.5 aperture, it works well enough for most circumstances.

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