Expedition to Mera Peak

This past March, I set off on my latest expedition to the Himalayas. This time, the aim was to climb Mera Peak, some kilometres to the west of Mt. Everest and try to reach to reach the summit at 6480m - it was not going to be easy.

This first part will feature images of the build-up towards the actual climb, these photos come from a variety of locations in Kathmandu and somewhere on the trail. All of these photos were taken with my Fujifilm X100S, in RAW and edited in Lightroom 5.

Istanbul in Black and White

Ever since the release of the Leica Monochrom, I have been thinking about the effect that a fully monochrome camera could have on my photography, the comfort level I would have to overcome and the change it would bring to my prespective of the scene I'm photographing.

Before you wonder; no, I have not bought a Leica Monochrom as I am still not made of money.

The other realisation I came to recently was that the JPEGs coming out of my X-Pro1 were by far cleaner, sharper and had better noise performance than anything I could ever achieve out of the X-Pro1 RAW files and Lightroom. So the conclusion? I've decided to shoot my X-Pro1 one in JPEG only, BW film emulation only and do some very light retouching in Lightroom (yes, the Dynamic Range in these JPEGs is that good).

Below is my first full trip following this ethos. Istanbul, beautiful Istanbul.