Smiling – Fuji X10 and studio strobes?

Vinny, AKA “Mr. Smiley Pants” doing what he does best…smiling.  He looks like this most of the time he’s awake, so he’s always a willing subject for a camera test.

I’ve been looking for the perfect travel camera for the last two years.  I’ve tried several of them and I really like the Fuji X10, but I hadn’t had a chance to shoot it.  My boss recently bought his first camera in 10 years…a Fuji X10.  He really liked it.  In fact he liked it so much, he bought the new Pro version that has interchangeable lenses, it is an incredible camera.   I’ve been a huge Fuji fan for many years.  I’ve shot Fuji pro film, I’ve even owned a Fuji 680 “big boy” medium format camera.  It only makes sense that I would entertain one of theirs for my next camera.  Super sharp optics, great color and built ruggedly with lots of great features.  This feels like a Leica or one of my other all time favorite cameras the Contax G2.

My initial thoughts were that I wanted to have a controlled comparison of the different film simulations.  This camera boasts multiple film “looks” and the one I’m most interested in looks like “Velvia” my personal all time favorite slide film.  Not necessarily a good choice for portraits, but unbeatable for landscapes and scenics.  Since we had some incredible Profoto lighting gear set up for a class, I thought I would use my camera and Ron’s to run through the looks in this controlled lighting situation.  That’s when the problems started, I slid the Profoto Air trigger on, set my manual exposure, pressed the shutter and nothing!  Not just my X10, but Ron’s 100 Pro too, neither one of them would fire the lights.  That just didn’t make sense, I went to the manual, read the flash pages, looked at blogs and did a YouTube search.  Others have talked about the issue, but there wasn’t a lot of information or any possible solutions.

Moving forward with my test, I tried to fire Nikon, Canon and Vivitar strobes in full manual.  Flash set to manual, camera on manual, nothing.  I tried to fire Pocket Wizard TT1/TT5 combination and again nothing.  Experiencing a similar non-fire situation a few weeks ago (different situation and not applicable here) I wasn’t totally surprised that the PW’s didn’t work on the X10.  (Note: The goal was not TTL, only to use as a standard trigger to shoot manually like I’ve done in the past with other studio  strobes) See additional info in the update section below.

What did surprise me was the fact that the Elinchrom Skyport DID fire the Ranger Quadra!  No modifier, just a simple snapshot, but important in the fact that while nothing else worked this one did.  As expected, beautiful flesh tones and even light as metered.

Conclusion:  I wish I had something more decisive, but for now I’m just more confused.  I’ll try to get to the bottom of this, and I am enjoying the camera.  But unless this camera is capable of using other non-Fuji strobes, I don’t know if it will end up in my camera bag.  That is really a shame because just packing it along and throwing one of my Nikon strobes in the bag would be a great travel option.

UPDATE: On Friday July 6th I was able to use the newest member of the Pocket Wizard family the Plus III’s and they worked flawlessly!  I was so excited they worked, they are small and light and worked just like I knew they would.  I have owned the same set of Multi-Max’s for about 10 years, they have been rebuilt by Rameesh at MAC and they still work every single time!

TT1/TT5 Follow up:  It turns out that the Pocket Wizard TT1/TT5′s have to be instructed to work in the “manual” mode on Nikon cameras.  I really see no practical reason for this, in fact it is VERY frustrating when you just want a simple trigger.  I am a manual strobe shooter anytime I have the ability to light that way.  However, at times when TTL will work AND speed lights have enough power to get it done right, I will use that technology.  To require owners to plug in the USB cord, update drivers, and select “allow manual trigger” seems like a waste of time in my opinion.  In an attempt to be thorough in my review, I want to make it as accurate as possible.  My personal units are on their way into the Product Manager now so he can look at them and make sure there is nothing wrong with mine.  I’ll let you know what the verdict is when I hear back from Phil.