Fujifilm X100S settings for black & white

In my review of the excellent Fujifilm X100S, I mentioned sharing my favourite in-camera settings for shooting in black & white in a future post. And you know what?! This is a future post!

So why black & white some people might ask?! And I can understand them, cause I'm mainly a color guy myself. The famous words of Vincent Van Gogh "Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life." means a lot to me. I simply love color! But I happen to love b&w as well, even though I shoot it mostly for my own pleasure, and not so much for my commercial work. Why?! Well you have to ask my clients that. But I believe there are a range of subjects that suit b&w better than color, and street photography is one of them. I wouldn't call myself a street photographer. Far from it. I have too much respect for the professional street photographers out there to even think a thought like that. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to enjoy shooting photos on the streets, and that I really do! And the X100S is the perfect camera for that, so I do it a lot! Actually more and more after I got my hands on the lovely X100S. Just for fun and inspiration really.

And with this camera, I almost exclusively shoot with the custom setting C1 set up for giving me both RAW files and black & white JPGs. Nothing special about that you might think, cause almost any camera on the market can do that. Hah, not like this! Cause with the X100S you can fine tune the b&w shots in-camera to a finished image, or at least very close. And I prefer getting my shots as close to finished in camera as possible. Saves me time, and it's also quite satisfying knowing the bits & bytes on the memory card is as perfect as you would want them to be.

With the X100S I shoot with ISO set to Auto, with a base ISO of 200 and a maximum of 6400. Digital noise really isn't an issue even this high. Trust me. And the shutter speed limit is mostly set to 1/125 of a second, unless I shoot to get some deliberate motion blur, then I find 1/30 sec is perfect. That gives me some motion and energy that can lift a picture to even greater heights. Well enough about that. I promised you my settings, and these are the settings I have come to love by simply shooting, testing, looking, evaluating and readjusting, over and over again for a couple of months. These settings give me pictures with good contrasts and some punch. And I love punchy b&w!

So the settings for my custom setting C1 for capturing in both RAW and black & white JPGs are as follows:

Image size: L 3:2

Image quality: F+RAW

Dynamic range: DR100

Film simulation: BR (monochrome + R filter)

Sharpness: +1

Highlight tone: +2

Shadow tone: +2

Noise reduction: -1

The shots included here are more or less straight out of camera jPGs. Just some cropping and minor adjustments and frames added in Snapseed on my iPad.

Hope you enjoy!

Cheers,

Eivind