Up until a few years ago, I never used a crop mode outside of creating thumbnails. Honestly I thought they were kinda stupid because I could always just crop into the image later, why would I waste time doing it on my camera? Well, as it turns out with many things in life, I realized it was me who was stupid.

Now of course there’s nothing wrong with snapping full sized images and just cropping later but as time has gone on it’s become very apparent that the hardest part about photography is simply “seeing”. It’s not about the light, the shutter speed, the settings, or even the focal length. It’s just finding the hidden pieces too a complicated puzzle. Using a crop helps by being able to cut out a bit of the noise or simply piece together as much of the image right into the camera as I can. It helps to build something you otherwise might not even know was there.

I credit Instagram for inspiring me to find landscape photography and push myself to travel. In 2014, Instagram started to shift from an app people used to add filters to their smart phone photos to a social platform where photographers dominated. This was the era when the chronological feed was still alive and before the algorithms changed everything. A place that platformed travel photography, grand landscapes to the masses, and inspired me to leave my home town to explore the world.

This started the golden era of Instagram for photographers… but golden eras don’t last forever.

I recently got to spend some time with the Fujifilm GFX100S II (thanks Fujifilm!) and from the moment I took the first shots, I was skeptical. Not because the images weren’t great, they were incredible. So much so that it seemed too good to be true. Was it just the moment, the light, or was there something more going on with this sensor?

Recently I owned the Hasselblad X2D and while those images were full of detail, they never made me question my camera choices, which is why I was so confused by my first shots with the GFX100S II as they have the same sensor.