Seek the Light

First of all, I am feeling very honored to get the chance to write something about my absolutely favorite hobby – photographing, in one of my beloved online magazines, Fuji X Passion.

May I give you a small introduction of myself and my path to Fujifilm: My name is Georg Ude, I am from Vienna the capital of beautiful Austria, and I am a very passionate amateur photographer. As this hobby may not be the cheapest sometimes, I also have to earn my daily savings by a “normal” job – by being a mechanical R&D engineer in the fields of plastic.

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I am in the Fujifilm universe for roughly three years, but I also experimented with other brands. In my beginnings, I took pictures with my mobile phone and an old Nikon DSLR. I also used a Leica Q in-between and explored the advantages of IBIS the first time. But one day, a colleague of mine showed me his Fujifilm X-Pro2 during a business trip – immediately I was hooked. I guess some of you know what came next – I traded in my old gear and bought a Fujifilm. It wasn’t the X-Pro2 but a second-hand X-H1 and the amazing Fujinon XF23mm F1,4. The X-H1 had IBIS which I really like for my style of taking pictures.

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I am a very visual guy and I think we don’t need to argue that the X-Pro (2) is definitely an eye-catcher. As I couldn’t get it out of my head, I traded in my X-H1 and got myself an X-Pro2 one day. Don`t get me wrong, the X-H1 is a fantastic camera but the X-Pro series was always my desired treasure of the Fujifilm lineup. The touch and feel are just right to me.

During the year of 2020, I had time to develop my photographic style further. I find my passion in urban, moody and detailed street photos – in preferring the night-time or diffuse light situations. Finally, the new X-T4 came in to play a role because of IBIS and the much better and accurate autofocus.

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During my Fuji journey, a lot of lenses came and went. Usually, I obtain my gear second hand. By doing that, I have the opportunity to try out more stuff without spending too much bugs of my hard-earned money and enjoy my GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) without the necessity of selling my car 😉 – attention, sarcasm ahead!

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Photographic Style
At the moment I am really into a dark and moody urbanism photographic style which is a really good match with my living environment – Vienna has enough of urbanism surroundings 😉 My greatest aim is to show people in their most “natural habitat”. I think this gives the last pop (in German: “das i Tüpfelchen auf dem i”) to the pictures and makes them very unique. Besides, I am very fascinated by the varieties of light in photography. To precise it further, I often look for artificial light in combination with the “blue hour” and fast lenses which creates a creamy bokeh and draws the attention to the main subject – this forms my desired look!

– Seek the light –

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Editing Work
In my opinion, nowadays editing goes hand in hand with clicking the shutter button, at least for my personal artwork. I use lightroom where I have created some presets as a starting point. When I take a picture, I often have an exact idea or look in front of my mental eye of how the finished picture should look like, so I fiddle around till I am satisfied. By the time, I am really quick in doing so, normally a picture takes about one minute to be edited.

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For me, a good starting point is to drag the white balance modulator till it fits to my eyes and then jump into the color HSL module. The final magic is done with Fujifilm’s film simulations, my preferred is Classic Chrome. When it comes to the aspect of technical quality, I don´t need tack sharp images in which you can zoom in 200% without any lack of sharpness. For me, emotions and moods which are transported through the image seem to be much more important.

As photographs often depend on my current personal mood, it’s not always easy to keep up a continuous style. However, I am continuously trying to find my own kind of touch-up and give my pictures a “viennaschorsch”-kind-of-look.

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See You
I hope you enjoyed my little abstract about photographing with Fujifilm! If you like to see more work done by me, I would be more than happy to get in contact with you over Instagram or mail: https://www.instagram.com/viennaschorsch/ or georgimages@gmail.com. Oh, and if you wondered – my Instagram name comes from the combination of my home town, Vienna, and by the nickname of my own name, George, – “Schorsch”.

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