Holiday Snapshot, Drink and Click – Austin, Texas

As we approach Christmas, I’m switching to a few days of festive holiday photos. I took this snapshot, two weeks ago, at probably the last Drink and Click of the year. I’m still making serious portraits at the event, but for today, I’m featuring this snapshot. There is, however, some special technology and gear involved.

If you get my newsletter, you know that I used this month’s featured camera to create this. It’s the Fujifilm XQ1, an old point and shoot back from 2013. I’ll talk more about the camera and its backstory in a future post.

What this camera does, however, is sort of unique to the Fujis. They have a super-intelligent flash system that balances the ambient light with the flash output. The resulting photograph does not overexpose subjects or turn the background pitch black. It’s a really pleasant snapshot using the built-in pop-up flash. This feature is not talked about often, but it’s something I really like about the Fuji cameras. Even my bigger Fuji X-A2 and X-T10 have it.

The XQ1 has a small-ish 2/3 inch sensor, and it doesn’t have stellar high ISO performance. I did some extra post-processing and high ISO noise reduction to make this ISO 1000 picture look decent. But, I think it’s a pretty acceptable snapshot in such a dark place.

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