I finally got around to exploring Greenwood Gardens, a local garden preserve that's been in my town for decades. It's hidden away inside Old Short Hills Park, and I only recently realized it was there in the first place!

The challenge that film photography poses is still fun to this day, albeit in a different form -- taking your oh-so-convenient digital camera and limiting yourself as you would if you had a single roll of film, and no way to check your work. It's 36 exposures or less, at a fixed ISO, and making these images as manually as you possibly can. Through the pain of restriction, the intent is that you'll spend more time thinking about what you're about to shoot, rather than firing your camera from the hip and hoping something comes of it. 

Frankly, I always knew this was a matter of time.

Less than a year ago, I purchased a Fujifilm X20 in lovely, lovely flat black. It's a terrific camera. It focuses fast, it reproduces the trademark colors of Fuji's most famous film stocks, and it's quieter than felt touching cotton.

However, something wasn't quite right. While the rest of the camera works very well, the sensor is ultimately the problem. While images look good initially, any post processing often drags copious amounts of grain into a photo -- even it it was shot in RAW format and is only being pushed by a single stop in Lightroom. Even when images weren't that altered, the dime-sized sensor reared its ugly head with excess noise and dramatic detail falloff in some situations. It was so nearly the camera I wanted it to be -- and thus, I kept leering amorously at the X100s, the "big brother" to the X20, wondering when I would take the plunge and grab it for myself.