I’ve been reading the early reviews on the revolutionary Fujifilm GFX 100 camera body, one of the most spectacularly capable and forward-looking products ever released since the dawn of digital photography roughly 20 years ago.  It has caused me to reflect back on my journey as a longtime Fujifilm shooter.

I remember the beginnings, which were oh, so different.

As I have noted before, on this site, I have a strange penchant for underdogs.  I must unconsciously seek out quirky and unconventional products, that are outside the mainstream.  In the 1990s, when everybody else was buying BMWs, I bought a Subaru SVX, a strange looking but lovely four-wheel-drive coupe.  My newest barbecue pit, a Hasty Bake, a charcoal cooker that is been made in roughly the same form since 1947.  I persist in using my Gravely G Series garden tractor, a stout design from the 1960s, rather than a more modern design from John Deere, or Kubota. 

And I’m a Fujifilm shooter.

I first became interested in the brand round about 2002.  At that point as a former film shooter I had been dabbling with a variety of point and shoot digital cameras, finally graduating to the Olympus E10/20 series. These sort of looked like digital SLRs, but had a fixed lens and a smaller sensor.  As I had some Nikon lenses, I was looking for a body with the Nikon F mount.  In my price range, that meant either a Nikon D100 or this weird camera from Fujifilm, called the S2 pro. 

The Nikon and the Fujifilm were based on a Nikon film body, the N 80 prosumer SLR. The D 100 was a fairly well-integrated product much like modern designs with good performance for the times. The Fujifilm, however, was a weird sort of hybrid, which many reviewers referred to as a “frankencamera” as the digital side of the camera, was obviously grafted to the mechanical parts in a much cruder way.

This manifested for instance, in the need for two types of batteries, a CR 44 to power the body functions, and two AA batteries, for the digital side.  The camera was slower and did not focus as well as its Nikon competition.  And it used weird memory cards.  But much like today, it offered an unusual sensor, with a diagonal rather than a square grid pattern, then offered higher resolution and better low light performance than the conventional sensor in the Nikon.  Plus, even then, Fujifilm color science was better.

Needless to say, given my proclivities, I bought the Fujifilm.  And I have never looked back.

I followed that camera with the S3 Pro and S5 pro bodies.  In each case, the integration and sensors of the camera improved, but the performance was always a step behind the mainstream SLRs, in terms of functionality and at times, resolution. 

Eventually, when Fujifilm stopped making DSLRs, I drifted over to Nikon digital bodies.  I still have a D800E that serves me well when I need it.

Then, in 2011, I acquired my first X100.  Once again, it had wonderful picture quality, but now a beautiful design, and a gorgeous lens, but was slow, with unreliable autofocus.  This remained a pattern for many years with subsequent camera offerings including the X Pro 1 and XT1, both of which did not perform at a level of their immediate competition.  Happily, these cameras were improved significantly over time due to Fujifilm’s continual firmware updates.

But over time, this penchant for releasing immature cameras is changing.  I think it’s clear that the last round of product offerings, the XT3 in particular, for the first time are seen as a highly competitive, if not clearly superior products compared for instance, to the Sony, and Nikon equivalents.

Enter the GTX 100.  Now we have a product that literally leapfrogs, over its competition, offering huge resolution (100 megapixels), in a beautifully designed professional level body.  It is the first medium format camera with image stabilization, as well as video features that rival anything in this format.  Now the body is quite expensive, too rich for my blood, at $10,000. However its nearest competitor, the Hasselblad H6D-100c is $28,000 for essentially the same (though non-stabilized) sensor without talking about very expensive Hasselblad glass.   The Fujifilm GFX lens line is also very high quality but proportionally priced.  One can buy a very nice Fujifilm GFX 100 body and lens collection for significantly less than the price of the Hasselblad body alone.

It’s so much fun, as one who remembers the bad old days of weird Fujifilm cameras, to see the brand emerge as a major mainstream force in the industry.

I think we’re finally done with “frankencameras”.

The forests in my neighborhood are dying.  Well not maybe the whole ecosystem, but sometimes it seems that in that at this time in history, there is an unprecedented onslaught against the eastern forest.

But it’s not true.  Such events have happened before. 

The American chestnut was arguably the most important tree species in the eastern forests of the 19^th century.  It was a large tree, at full maturity as tall as 120 ft., with the base of some tree 5 to 6 feet in diameter.  Its wood was light, yet strong and rot proof; useful in many functions including railroad ties, and house framing.  Its yearly crop of mast or nuts were an important food source for multiple species, including our own.   

In the early years of the 20^th century, a fungal pathogen known as the chestnut blight, arrived in the city of New York riding along on A shipment of Asian chestnut trees.  This blight quickly spread, and in 30 years, wiped out millions of chestnut trees throughout the east.  This extraordinary organism, many times serving as a node tree in what we know to be our interconnected forests, became virtually extinct.

If you walk along the trails around our community, you will periodically observe a cluster os sapling sized trunks interspersed with dead or dying snags. These will bear the distinctive serrated leaves of the American chestnut. There may be long strands of catkins in the spring, and a few nuts in the fall. These are the withered descendants of their once magnificent species. Each sapling will live a few years until they are girdled by the fungus, The roots, which are unaffected, will desperately send up more shoots. Thus they have existed for perhaps a century.

  A few mature trees still survive, either under the protection of humans in horticultural collections, or isolated in the backcountry.

  I have stood beside one such tree that exists deep in a draw on the west rim of Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon.  There it has escaped, for now, the blight that has wiped out its relatives.  As I stood there alone, under its broad canopy, I was transfixed.

 There are currently efforts To revive the species using several techniques, including backcrossing the vulnerable Americans species with its resistant Asian cousins. Still, the loss of this magnificent species leaves me wistful in that I never was able to witness the beauty of the so-called chestnut-oak forest that was so much a part of our region.

Then there was Dutch elm disease, This was another Asian fungus that arrived by way of the Netherlands in the 1920s, and devastated our majestic American Elms. Some Elms still survive.

There certainly been other threats to forest members over the years. Our oak trees are constantly under attack by another Asian immigrant, the gypsy moth, which can cause multiple defoliations over time, killing even robustly healthy oak trees. We lost two magnificent roughly 150-year-old specimens several years ago due to an outbreak.

Our magnificent hemlocks, Pennsylvania’s state tree, is at risk due to the Hemlock Wooly Algedid, another imported pest.

Yet in both cases, the species are persevering.

Now over 100 years after the blight was introduced, we are once again faced with a similar situation.   

The ash tree is in a way, an unheralded species of tree common in Pennsylvania’s forests.  Its wood is light but strong, rather famously used to create the baseball bats used by major league baseball over the years.  Yet it’s an unassuming tree, without any flashy blooms, or plentiful fruits or nuts to remind us of its presence.

I fact I looked for images of ash trees in my archives. I found images of oak, maples and even spindly chestnuts. But none sadly, of the, now threatened tree.

Unfortunately, At least as a member of our forest community, It’s about to follow the chestnut tree into oblivion.

Again it is an Asian immigrant, this time an insect, The Emerald Ash Borer.  First found in the upper Midwest In the early two thousand, It is spread quickly Throughout the Eastern United States.  First noted in Pennsylvania and 2007. It spread quickly on the wing. It is virtually a 100% lethal, once it infests even healthy ash trees. 

We began to notice the signs last summer. Along the dirt road that leads to my home, there are at least 50 Green ash trees many of them quite mature. Last September their bark began to deteriorate as though someone had taken a giant sander to them.  This is called “blonding”, and is caused by peeling off the bark.   Soon we could see the characteristic “D “shaped holes in the bark caused by the insects.

 This spring, none of them have foliage. In fact, I have yet to find  an ash tree that has any sign of life

It is possible to save individual trees. I have none on my property, but if I did, they could be injected every couple of years with a pesticide that will protect them from the parasite. It is expensive, and as I understand it would need to go on for the foreseeable future. Sadly, it is the only way and is obviously not practical for the trees of our woodlands.

Science tells us, that our forests are complex communities, with fungi interconnecting the trees of many species. Trees it turns out can use these networks to communicate chemically.  They can warn each other of danger such as an influx of parasites., They will even share carbon and other nutrients when necessary.  Thus the forest behaves as a family of organisms, working together.

With this newest onslaught that will likely wipe out a species, I wonder:

Do the Oaks mourn?