My first 'film roll' on the Fujifilm X half

Out of Camera #8

I only seriously got into photography quite late, after I’d moved to Japan, and early on I was mostly into film. It was a much more affordable hobby back in 2009 — not just because of film costs, but because lots of companies like SuperHeadz and PowerShovel would put out tons of lo-fi toy cameras that served as design playgrounds.

There is something to be said for cameras that are so small you take them everywhere and so fun to use that you don’t necessarily think about the resulting images while you’re making them. That’s what Fujifilm is going for with its new X half, a compact camera with a vertically-oriented sensor designed to evoke the days of 35mm half-frame.

This is objectively a pretty silly camera. You all know I love 1” sensors, but usually when they’re paired with fast lenses in thinner phones than the X half. The optical viewfinder is a basic tunnel with no frame guidelines and a ton of parallax. And the flagship feature, “film camera mode”, locks down functionality so you can’t use the LCD screen, change film simulation mode or view any of your photos until you’ve shot enough frames and “developed” them in a phone app.

But the X half is also adorable, so obviously I had to try it.

Here are some shots from my first virtual roll of film a few days ago, in which I walked to the train station to go watch FC Tokyo play what turned out to be a chaotic match against Yokohama FC. These were all shot on the Astia film simulation, just like my X-Pro2 pictures from last week.