Kathy & I headed to Charleston, SC over the Labor Day weekend to attend the Lowcountry Jazz Festival there.  When I was packing up my photo gear I didn’t know if I would be permitted to take a camera to the concerts, so at the last minute I pulled out my Fuji X-10 and decided to toss it in the bag.

I hadn’t been using the Fuji in a while, in fact I’ve been on a “use the best camera all the time” kick and haven’t been carrying a point & shoot camera at all.  And I have never been happy with the  way Lightroom processes the RAW files I’ve gotten out of the Fuji, so I had sort of abandoned it.

I have read a lot of comments about how good Fuji’s JPEG processing is, so I set the camera up to shoot high quality JPEGs.  And although I could have taken the “big camera” to the concerts I decided to just take the Fuji.  In fact that was the only camera I used all weekend.  We went out and did some touristy stuff and the X-10 did the job.

It did a pretty good job all in all, especially considering that it is several years old.  The concert photos were taken at ISO 1600 or 3200 and came out pretty good for a small sensor.  I decided to post these with no processing at all.  A few are a little on the dark side, but that is mostly due to the fact that I was using negative exposure compensation at the concerts and kept forgetting to reset it when I went outside!

I’m pretty impressed with the results from this camera.  In fact, based on a lot of things I have been reading lately, I’ve just about decided to try out one of their newer offerings as a possible eventual replacement for the full frame beast that I’ve been carrying.  It’s tough to beat the files I’m getting from the 5D, but with results like these from a several-year-old point & shoot, I think I owe it to myself to at least rent a newer model and see how I like it.  No surprise that we have some upcoming travel plans 😉 , so I may need to check out the options.