I love shooting black and white with my Fuji X100S and I try to carry it everywhere. I feel that if I’m carrying a camera all the time, I have a responsibility to take pictures when they throw themselves at me. I’ve procrastinated too many times when a picture presented itself, telling myself I’ll come back later.

The other day turned out to be a color day. I drove my wife and mother-in-law to a baby shower, where I shot a group picture of all the women. No way would my wife let me do that in black and white. I used a small Fuji EF-20 shoe mount flash bounced off the ceiling and actually did the editing using the Photogene app on my ipad mini.

The best part of the day was the strange weather, intermittent thunder storms. When we were about three miles from home, my wife spotted a double rainbow so I immediately turned around and pulled over where I had a good unobstructed view from a Pennsylvania Turnpike overpass. I quickly set the camera to low ISO color and took these two pictures.

I recommend using the user assigned  settings whenever available on digital cameras. The Nikon Coolpix A has two user settings and the Fuji X100S has three. On the Nikon I have one set to Auto ISO color for everyday shots and the other set to lowest ISO color for shooting booth pictures with the camera on a tripod. On the Fuji I have one set to black and white with inclusion of a red filter and specific noise and sharpness settings and auto ISO. The second with color and auto ISO for general shooting and the third set at the lowest ISO color for maximum image quality. For both cameras, I carry a print out of my exact user settings so I can tweak them if needed and then reset them to my assigned defaults. This is more important with the Fuji because there are so many options available in the settings.

If you’re an artist and your digital camera has user settings, I recommend setting it like I did for the Coolpix A where one is set for general shooting and the other to photograph your booth or artwork on a tripod. Aren’t user settings great?