Istanbul in Black and White

Ever since the release of the Leica Monochrom, I have been thinking about the effect that a fully monochrome camera could have on my photography, the comfort level I would have to overcome and the change it would bring to my prespective of the scene I'm photographing.

Before you wonder; no, I have not bought a Leica Monochrom as I am still not made of money.

The other realisation I came to recently was that the JPEGs coming out of my X-Pro1 were by far cleaner, sharper and had better noise performance than anything I could ever achieve out of the X-Pro1 RAW files and Lightroom. So the conclusion? I've decided to shoot my X-Pro1 one in JPEG only, BW film emulation only and do some very light retouching in Lightroom (yes, the Dynamic Range in these JPEGs is that good).

Below is my first full trip following this ethos. Istanbul, beautiful Istanbul.

Expedition to Island Peak (Part I)

As I start to mentally prepare for next year's expedition to the summit of Mera Peak, I realised that I never got around posting photos from this year's expedition to the summit of Island Peak in Nepal. I've decided to stop lazying around and post something.

The photos below cover in chronological order the journey from Lukla until Dingboche, where we walked for close to 2 weeks around 180 kilometers and ascended roughly 3000 vertical meters, summiting Gokyo Ri, crossing the breathtaking Gokyo lakes and the Ngozumpa Glacier, traversing the difficult and steep Cho-La Pass, summiting Kala Pattar and taking our mandatory photos in Everest Base Camp and the Khumbu Glacier.

This part of the trek, besides being visually amazing, was a fantastic acclimatisation for what was to come after Dingboche (next post). The hard climb of Island Peak (Imja Tse - 6180m).

The streets of Thamel, Kathmandu.

I've been very lazy/slow in processing photos from my trips, but I have decided it is time to get back to the basics.

Early April this year, I decided to embark in one of my mountaineering trips, this time to climb Island Peak (6180m) in Nepal. I will be posting photos from the trek and from the summit push in the coming week, but in the meantime, I am posting some of my personal favourite shots of the streets of Thamel, the iconic neighbourhood of Kathmandu.

All the photos were taken with my X-Pro1 and either my 35/1.4 or my 18/2.0 Fujinon lenses. The last time I went mountaineering, I took my 5D and 35L lenses - what a difference it makes, not to the extra weight of a DSLR!

Anyway, enough of this and on to the photos. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking them.