“X-Pro3 is essentially the camera I’ve been searching for,” says photojournalist, Bess Adler. “Previously, for my street photography projects, I was either using a big DSLR, which felt like a burden to lug around, or shooting on my phone, which didn’t produce high-quality images. But X-Pro3 is discreet. It’s small and lightweight, so I can remain quiet and unobtrusive, and it has superb quality. It’s the combination I needed all along.”

A native New Yorker who shoots for a variety of publications, Bess, in her latest project, took X-Pro3 on various walks through New York neighborhoods, looking for the unexpected. “It’s an honor for me to get to engage so deeply and regularly with a place like New York,” she explains, “but one downside is that after more than a decade of working, I’ve grown almost too familiar with this city. So, for this new series, I wanted to use the medium of street photography to reinvigorate the way the city looks to me. I wanted to capture the surprising patterns, the intricacies of life, and the nuances of the everyday. In a way, the whole purpose was to reinvent my relationship with my city.”

For the project, along with X-Pro3, Bess used the XF23mmF1.4 R, and found the pairing to be a superb combination for her documentary style. As well as being “fast and durable, so it performed great in the field,” Bess found X-Pro3’s traditional styling connected perfectly with her way of working, and was able to bring back a purer approach to her photography. “Straightaway, I loved the look and feel of the camera,” she explains, “it has a very ‘old soul’ feel to it, and it felt very intuitive to use.”

She adds: “I was originally trained using a film camera and used to shoot solely on rangefinder-style bodies, before I switched to digital about ten years ago. So, while it’s a cutting-edge camera, X-Pro3 gave me a great feeling of nostalgia. I particularly loved that the main LCD screen can be hidden. This is something that encourages me not to automatically look back at my images and instead stay focused in the present, on the scene around me. That’s vital for my kind of work.”

In that way, street photography is unlike any other discipline, according to Bess, and it’s something she sees as very meditative. “When I’m shooting in the city, I have to let go of trying to plan my shoot and stay present; it’s a way of shooting that opens my eyes to the world around me,” she says. “It forces me to accept that sometimes I won’t be completely proud of what I’m shooting and that is okay, because there is always something else around the corner. I am primarily a documentary photographer, working on assignments and long-term stories about communities, so it’s about looking for a complete picture, and X-Pro3 really helped me with that.”

The process of shooting in this way is something that improves Bess’s documentary skills every time she does it. “Every new project trains me to be a better photographer, and that means I can travel deeper into the documentary stories that I care so deeply about,” she says. “The more I do it, the more I notice intimate moments between people, how to work with natural light and just appreciate the simplicity of the mundane.” And because X-Pro3 is a camera with features that aid connection to the subject, rather than getting in the way of that relationship, Bess says that it helps her to “get inspired by the surprises that arise from everyday situations, and those places that exude a sense of community.” Bess likes to push herself to find those magical moments that exist between people.