Holi Festival of Colours and the X100S

Last Saturday some friends, my Wife and I went to a Holi festival of colors in Böblingen which is near Stuttgart/Germany.

Long before going I was in a real dilemma not knowing which camera to take. I knew I had to take one as I had seen many pictures of people having fun and being covered in all kinds of colors.
The X100S would be a great camera to take. Great image quality, stunning Fuji colors, fast enough....
.... but it is not dust or waterproof.
Damn. I tried a kind of bag to put it in when you go diving. The problem though that it generated heavy lens flares.
But I did not want to risk the X100S to get damaged. So I started looking around and remembered that the Olympus OM-D E-M5 was weather sealed.
Can I really justify buying a OM-D just for the festival? It took some heavy thinking but at the end of the day I found a good offer on a near enough brand new OM-D including the 12-50mm lens.

Great, one week to go and I am holding the Olympus in my hands. Gosh this menu is never ending. Setting up the camera was not all that easy but I managed.

I took out for some test shots loaded them onto my computer and took a look at the pictures. Not bad for a micro four thirds sensor.
Colors are nice, autofocus is really fast. It seems to anticipate what you want to focus on and as soon as you touch the button the camera has focused already. Yes it is that fast.
Image quality is very good but if you compare it to the X100S´s output you can see a difference. The OM-D does have some noise even at lower ISO settings.
The Fuji is noise free full stop.



And then it was festival Saturday. About one hour before it was time to leave I could not help myself. I wrapped up the X100S in cling film and sellotape. You can imagine what my wife said.
"That´s not the camera you bought for the festival"
"No your right, it´s not." I tried to explain. "You see. It´s like a pair of old shoes. The new ones look flush and clean and work well. But the old ones just fit so nicely and one tends to wear the old tatty ones."
"Ahhh" my wife said "Well I just chuck the old ones out as soon as the new ones are there"

Ok, OK I get the point. I just should have stuck with my original idea and not bother about a new camera.
Well the OM-D is up for sale again so I won't loose out on any money.

By the time I had the X100S wrapped up our friends had arrived and we took off.

Holi hear we come.

The weather looked promising. Sunny, warm and just a few clouds in the sky.

We arrived at the festival and had to stand in the queue for some time. Enough time for some fun shots.

  My gorgeous wife with her great orange sunglasses.

By the time we had entered the festival area the first countdown had finished and the people had thrown the first lot of color bags already.

Me and a stranger. I´m the smaller guy ;-)

Just some random shots of people enjoying themselves.

Now it´s time for some dust action. Did I seal my camera well enough?

It was really dusty and the sun was not to be seen. Nor the blue sky. It took some minutes to clear up and then my wife took a shot of me after the first bit of action.

Some more random shots.

The professional shootes where there as well. Ohhh how I love my X100S.

What happens if you cover your wife´s hair in pink powder.

She has to shake it of.

Just a slight contrast curve using the VSCO Toolkit in Aperture.

Time for the second countdown.

This first one of the hand is a jpeg ooc with some tweaking by using the VSCO toolkit in Aperture.

Wow that was some stress on the wrapped up X100S. I hope the cling film kept all the dust off.

And look at me.

That was a great festival and we all had an awesome time.

What a great time.
Now to the most important question you are all asking yourselves. What did the X100S look like after all this powder throwing, and did it survive?

Yes it did. It took no damage at all.

All shots are jpegs ooc with no processing if not stated otherwise.

I do hope you enjoyed my pictures as much as I did taking them.
Do leave a comment if you wish.

Coming up next will be something very different.
I will try some landscape photography with the X100S and the X-E1 so be sure to come back again.