December 31st, 2007 ahhh food
happy new year. i’m still eating cheap christmas specials, like the panettone above. i prefer the light, buttery, spicy taste to the heavier cakes and puddings of ye olde englande. christmas usually means looking forward to a good crop of cherries and panettone popping up in shops (cheaper at your continental grocery store). mum used to work in an italian nursing home when we lived in sydney, so she would bring an odd shaped large box with a strange bready thing inside, and i came to expect to eat one every year! nowadays i’m quite happy to lug one home via the train.
panforte i discovered only this christmas though at the department store sales. i held off buying, but found when i returned the next day, other people who liked italian cakes had run off with the lot of them. luckily i’ve had a chance to sample them elsewhere… as with panettone, it’s not overly rich and goes well with coffee. but don’t put it in the fridge, because it makes this dense cake liable to break your cheap knives.
i’ve posted pictures from my classica before, but i thought i’d give a minireview. the fujifilm natura website is what convinced me to shell out for one (the classica model with a zoom, since i didn’t have other point and shoot cameras with a zoom lens at the time). it promised to be an ideal lowlight camera, especially when used with the specially produced 1600 natura film. i’ve since run out of that film, but don’t see any great need to buy any more. the camera works just as well with other speed films, although if shooting at night, it would be best to use the nighttime function on the camera (slow shutter speed) or to use the flash. and the flash isn’t too bad either, being fairly bright but dispersing wide enough to act as a fill-in.
i do find that it tends to overexpose in bright sunlight, not the nice arty exposure found in my olympus pen d, but a kind of painted on, low contrast kind of look. the first photo might be an example. maybe i should use something lower than 400, but i usually find that its useful in indoor situations. so therein lies the tradeoff.
the lens (28-55mm) tends to distort a little when zoomed in, which is most apparent when shooting portraits laterally.
other than those above comments, i am pretty happy with the camera, though feel that it’s a little overhyped. but at least it’s not as expensive as the next p&s fujifilm released, the klasse w!
here’s an earlier commercial for the natura cameras, when they used to come in blue, lavender and silver finishes, obviously marketed at women…
