Last week, after the sunrise shoot in Applecross with James, I grabbed a much needed coffee and got chatting about all things the art of photography. One of the many things discussed was the idea of shooting in JPEG only using custom film simulation settings on Fujifilm cameras. It's an intriguing idea and to be honest the film simulations was what converted me from a Canon DSLR shooter to the Fujifilm X series cameras. When I first got the X-T10, I was still using Lightroom 4 and it wasn't able to read .RAF files. That meant I was shooting JPEGs only using the in-built film simulations and was rather pleased with my images back in the day. As the months went by, I decided to jump onto Lightroom CC and had access to editing the raw files. I haven't really gone back to shooting just JPEGs since for the most part.
James introduced me to the Film Simulation Challenge from Fuji X Weekly blog. The premise is simple, back in the analog film camera days, photographers only had a limited number of exposures (e.g. 12, 24 or 36) and had to make each frame count. Now a days exposures are digital and easy to come by. The challenge is to create some in-camera "recipes" simulating filmic looks (e.g. Kodachrome 64, Kodacolor etc). Then limiting yourself to shooting a "roll of film" with no post-processing. It's all just straight out of camera! It's a daunting but creatively challenging idea. There is also something magical about Fujifilm film simulations that I feel is hard to replicate in post-processing.
On the weekend, I decided to do a photowalk around Perth city for a few hours as I had a few wide angle fuji lenses to test out. I decided to partially take on this challenge for this photowalk. While I didn't limit myself to 36 images, I did decide to set up a couple of film simulation recipes in-camera. I based my custom film simulation closely to this Kodachrome recipe.
My settings = Base: Classic Chrome, Dynamic Range: DR200, Highlight: -1, Shadow: +1, Color: +2, Noise Reduction: -2, Sharpening: +2, White Balance: Auto, ISO: Auto up to 1600.
The images below were taken on the Fujifilm X-T10 with a variety of wide angle lenses the fujifilm XF 16mm f1.4, fujifilm XF 14mm f2.8 and the Laowa 9mm f2.8 lens. For my first attempt at creating this "recipe", I think there were a handful of shots that I quite liked. I still need to tweak some of the settings before I'll be happy with the simulation. However it was quite liberating to be able to go through my JPEGs and pick up a bunch to share without having to do any post-processing. All the images shared here are straight out of camera (no cropping or perspective correction either). This has been a truly liberating way to share and enjoy the art of photography.
If you haven't heard of the challenge or if you think it sounds intriguing, check it out for yourself. Thanks Camera Electronics for kindly loaning me a bunch of wide angle lenses to test and play with. I'm still experimenting and formulating my thoughts on the different lenses, which I'll discuss in a future blog post (or two). Thanks for stopping by today.
J.