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I had been waiting for Leica’s big announcement on the 10th for a while… secretly hoping they would release a M10 with a competitive sensor. It didn’t happen; what they brought to market was essentially an improved M9- that only shoots black and white. That’s great, but not something I can justify. To make a long story short, that event combined with the now legendary Zack Arias blog posting lead me to the X100. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Canon gear… but it is heavy and more than I want to deal with when I am just out and about. The X100 sounded quirky, but also somehow perfect (i.e. small, discreet, high quality photos). None of this is news, and this blog posting might sound about a year old to some of you… but I just got off of the fence and wanted to share my thoughts. I love the X100. Last year I photographed the Vergennes Laundry (and was so excited when the photos made it into Food & Wine). I do not often get the chance to revisit editorial work, but this was a perfect opportunity… I knew there was going to be great light, plenty of action, and delicious food. Not to bog things down with shop talk, but I also knew the ISO on this camera was incredible and so I primarily shot with Aperture Priority. Just a few more quick notes before the photos (which always speak more to me in gear reviews). The shutter is near silent, which I love. The viewfinder is fantastic (I did forget to switch to EVF for a few of the close ups, and I think that would have helped with parallax framing issues). Auto white balance works- it works amazingly well. The AF is certainly workable (read: focus, frame, wait, click). One thing that I was only slightly disappointed about…  raw files processed through LR are still better looking. The straight-out-of-camera JPG’s are definitely usable, but I will continue to shoot raws. However, I will also continue to tinker with the contrast and sharpness settings, fingers crossed because it would be *heavenly* (or ironically like the “film” days) to not have to run everything through LR processing. Bottom line and more than anything else… the X100 is fun to use! Please feel free to email me if you have any specific technical questions… Thanks again Julianne and Didier!