The colour-blind traveller

Hey, I’m Luc Buffard-Morel, alias Lucio for my friends, or Lbm as a professional filmmaker and photographer. I’m 25 years old, and I live in France near Gap (Hautes-Alpes) in the Alps.

I am a Chef by profession, after having done a Baccalaureate in Cooking. In the last few years before the global pandemic, I travelled a lot, especially in South East Asia (Vietnam, Thailand) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), then in Mongolia and Russia at the end of 2019.

• 

I started photography and video as a self-taught person thanks to the travels I’ve made, to leave a trace and memories of what I had the chance to see. Adventure and discovery gave me a taste for images. Little by little, I began to love it and to always go out with the camera in my hands.

• 

• 

• 

I started photography with a G80 from Lumix, then I quickly moved on to the X-T3 and then the X-T4 from Fujifilm. Since the end of 2020, I have set up my own business to have this passion as a second job. I love travelling and sports in general, especially mountain sports, as I have always lived in the Alps (skiing, hiking, etc.).

I have also been passionate about cooking since I was a child because I love to start with raw materials and end up with a result, just like in photography. Creating with my hands has always been important to me.

I like landscape and road trip photos and vanlife photos, and now I’m more and more into portraits and photomontages or collages to create a story and tell it.

• 

• 

• 

I like to tell a story through photography and I especially like the artistic and “old school” side of photography. I have always liked analogue photography because, for me, it is closer to the artistic side of a painting, with grain and less saturated colours.

The new modern cameras are good for corporate and professional work, but for me, I like to work with vintage lenses or cameras that transmit emotions better. I am, moreover, colour blind, and the too saturated colours do not approach at all my vision of the things there. On the contrary, a smaller range of colours corresponds to me much more.

• 

• 

• 

I really like some photographers like @d_malou for the film and storytelling side, @zimydakid and @vagabondiary for the travel and landscape side or @camillerdp for his originality and relationship to surfing and the ocean.

For me, the Fuji X-T4 is a great camera because it is as good for video as it is for photography. It’s a great camera for both video and stills, and as I do both, I can move around with one camera and save space in my camera bag as I always try to keep the weight down when travelling.

• 

• 

• 

I love its colours and the vintage look with control dials and aperture ring. The design is really great. In video it is perfect in 4k 10 bits up to 50 fps, and then I can go up to 200fps for slow motion in Full HD. I can shoot outdoor video (travel/wedding/clip) as well as indoor video (corporate) because in low light and up to ISO 1250 there is no loss of quality.

For still photography, I use the XF16-55mm F2.8 from Fuji, or for landscapes XF10-24mm F4, and it is just perfect for my use with a very good focus for still photography and video. I am either 100% manual or AFC for my focusing settings, and I often use continuous focus and then switch to manual to play with the blur.

• 

• 

• 

I bought my Super Takumar 50mm F1.4 last year when I was looking for a film lens that would work on my X-T4. I love the 100% manual side of the lens. The slightly yellowed colours match my expectations, and I like its manual focus ring, which is quite good for 1979.

• 

I like to play with the blur on my pictures with this lens, and the bokeh at f1.4 or even f2 is fabulous. I bought an M42 to F-X adapter from K&F Concept to adapt it to my camera, which is not very expensive but of good quality and does the job. But as it is an APSC sensor, it is equivalent to a 75mm field of view.

I get great results with this lens, especially the warmer colours (yellow/orange), which are more in line with my style of photography, as well as the grain in the image, which I like a lot. The bokeh and flares in front of the sun are incredible during the golden hour. The colours really match what I understand as colour blind, and I like the fact that the colours are quite dull.

• 

• 

• 

It adds a style to my personal photos, with a signature and character if I compare it to the very sharp photos from my XF16-55mm F2.8. I love shooting portraits with this, lens especially at f/2, where I find the best results with manual focus. The 75mm equivalence is good for portraiture, but I can also get some nice landscape shots closing the aperture to f8.

• 

• 

• 

I am looking at buying a film camera to start using 35mm film and get back to the basics of photography. I am interested in a Pentax Spotmatic 1000 to use my Super Takumar (M42 mount) on it.

I’m working in the kitchen as a second until the end of the summer, and then my partner and I want to go back to New Zealand for at least a year to fulfil our dream of being 100% vanlife.

• 

We hope to be able to leave in January 2022 to take photos and videos all day long, to wake up and take my surfboard to go riding, but also to re-discover this fabulous country of nature. With this in mind, we hope to fit out our van and then, when we return to France, do the same thing but in a larger model.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•