Portugal & Spain | GFX100RF
Over the last few weeks my wife and I traveled through Portugal and Spain while I documented most of the trip with the GFX100RF. Lisbon, Porto, Sintra, Cascais, Seville, Ronda, and Setenil de las Bodegas all felt completely different from one another, and photography became a huge part of how I experienced each place.
Halfway through the trip, in Porto, the camera completely died. One second it was working perfectly, then the next it displayed a focus error and became unusable.
I’ve previously traveled to New York, Japan, and London with the X100 system, which made me a huge fan of the one lens camera approach for travel photography. A big reason I upgraded to the GFX100RF was because of how much I enjoyed the digital crop feature and SOOC JPEG workflow on the X100 series. It slows me down, makes me shoot with more intention, and feels closer to shooting film than heavily editing RAW files afterward.
Everything here was shot primarily in-camera using the Vibrant Arizona film simulation recipe, with Lightroom adjustments limited to exposure corrections, cropping, straightening, and spot removal. The Unfold photo template also compresses the images quite a bit, so some of the finer detail and grain gets lost compared to the originals.
I also pushed myself to stop relying so heavily on shallow depth of field. A lot of these images were shot around f/11 to f/16, using layering, framing, and harsh European sunlight to build depth instead.
The trip itself was incredible. One of the biggest highlights was unexpectedly finding ourselves in the middle of a procession in Seville, shown in the 19th slide. Watching the massive crowd move together through the narrow streets is something I’ll never forget.
The camera is only four months old and I’m sending it to Fujifilm for repair today. I genuinely loved shooting with the GFX100RF, which made the failure hit even harder and definitely shook my confidence in the system a bit.
Thanks for checking out the work.
Instagram: @KenworthyPhoto
