A few reasons why I won't be using recipes in the next year.

Hello friends,

There comes a time when you’ve got to make a hard decision (does that sound cliché? Already off to a good start I see).

Today I’m talking about my decision to leave the Fujifilm recipes behind and going back to editing my own photos.

So… yeah. If you came here just for the recipes, then it’s time to say goodbye, I guess. I’ll miss you. Here, I’ll make it easy for you 🫠.

For the 5 of you that are still here, let’s talk about it.

Fujifilm jpeg engines and the recipes the community has created are a huge reason why I fell back in love with photography. I was fed up with making terrible looking photos with my edits, and got bored of the whole thing for a good while.

When I first stumbled upon the recipes on Fujixweekly, I’m wow-ed at how I can get beautiful looking photos, straight out of the camera, just like that. I don’t have to spend hours and hours editing photos every time I shoot, and instead can have a more analog-like experience and get nice photos right out of the box, just like that.

From that point I made my entire personality Fuji recipes 😬

I love the thrill of hunting for new recipes, and the excitement of looking at the SOOC jpegs I get from a new recipe. I also joined this little community called film.recipes Facebook group, which I loved (decent chances that you found me from there 😸).

But for the past month or two, I’ve been mulling over this decision of going back to Lightroom and my dark editing dungeon.

Here are the list of reasons, which I guess when I wrote down, made me realized this is the right choice for me.

1. The biggest reason I guess is my vision of my art has evolved past what’s possible with Fujifilm recipes. Fujifilm recipes are great at creating nice photos right out of the box, but I’m not that interested in just “nice photos” anymore. I’ve grown to be more interested in creating good “pieces of art”, if that makes sense. I’ll elaborate further.

2. I’ve been shooting more and more, but I’ve started liking a lot of my photos less and less. I maybe like 4-5 photos out of every 1000 shot I take now. Hence, when there’s a photo I actually like, I want to give it more love and attention.

   

   There are times when I go through a whole day of shooting, and come back disliking pretty much all of the photos. This is one of the few ones I liked from one of those “incidents” 😬.

3. A lot of my inspirations come from painters like Hopper, Monet, and one of my favorites recently, Hiroshi Nagai. I want to create photos that are less… real, and more “painterly”. And for that I needed more. The perfect colors for the mood. The perfect color pallet. Dodging, burning, cloning, toning and everything in between. A lot of the stuff I want to create are just not feasible with the jpeg engines of Fujifilm cameras, as robust as they are.

   

   Here’s an example, I guess. This is a recent re-edited photo that I really love. The cyberpunk pink/purple palette is one of the aesthetics I’ve always been interested in, which wouldn’t really be feasible to get from SOOC jpegs.

4. Shooting with recipes was a way for me to simplify photography, but it actually complicate things for me on the field now. These days when I’m in the field, I keep fiddling with my cameras, switching recipes and thinking which recipe would be the best for the shot. Sometimes I’d take a bunch of the same photos with different recipes. Sometimes I’d open my raw converter in camera and switch recipe of one of the photos. Recipes are very nice when I just wanted some nice photos, and didn’t think much about the kind of art I want to make. Now that I’m just a bit more sophisticated though, recipes seemed to have become a hindrance and take away attention from composing a good shot.

5. I have considered kept shooting recipes with RAW + jpegs, but the White Balance would be messed up and those are baked into the RAWs. I want to have good white balance right out of the camera for my RAWs (mostly because Lightroom’s Auto White Balance kinda sucks). Also, if I’m editing my RAWs again anyways, I might as well save storage space for those jpegs (which are still like 20mbs for this 40 megapixel camera, and those add up).

6. I want to start building my own look and stop depending on Fujifilm base sims and color science. Which is funny because I bought a Fuji camera for those exact sims in the first place 🤷. I have other cameras I’m using (right now, a Olympus TG Tough as an EDC that shoots raw), and cameras I want to try eventually (a cheap full frame like the first/second generation of Sony A series maybe, so I can adapt my line up of vintage lenses again, and/or maybe a medium format camera like the first gfx 50R, oh and a ricoh gr3x when I can afford it again, oh and maybe a cheap m43 camera to toss around, or and this and that…). And so I want to build a bunch of “looks” that will persist through all my GAS episodes 🤷.

   

   One of my recent photos captured on one of my current EDC, the Olympus TG7. Technically this photo will make “real photographers” cringe. I forgot to change the ISO so this was 2000ISO on a tiny 1/2.3” sensor. I also cropped this down to, idk, 4 megapixels or something. Yet this is one of my favorite shots recently. Just such beautiful light 😌. Makes me question why I even have nice things sometimes 🤷

So… yeah.

I will miss a few things though, which makes this divorce quite a bit harder on me.

1. The sims. Man, the sims. Classic Negative and Eterna are still my gals (do you cringe from reading that? 😏). Acros and Monochrome are very nice as well. If I only shoot B&W I’d use Acros and just keep editing jpegs, because I like it so much. I know I can still access these base sims in Lightroom if I want to, but let’s just rip the bandage off and let it bleed all over the carpet so I can get over it 🫠.

   

   Eterna is a recent favorite sim of mine. The airy pastel colors I’ve been able to get out of it is just so nice. “Pastel” Portra 160 recipe.

2. The community aspect of Fujifilm recipes. I’ve grown to be quite fond of Justin and the nice folks of the film.recipes facebook group, as well as looking at photos people shot with different recipes and trying those out myself.

3. The process. I did very much enjoyed the process of hunting for sims and shooting them. The joy of looking at nice, pretty much finished photos right out of the viewfinder. It’s quite a bit jarring coming back to just looking at the base provia “look” at first.

In the end though, the art comes first, and I think you’d agree.

I’ve learned a lot with fuji recipes. And I’m forever thankful for them. I will also keep shooting recipes for family photos and portraits, as I think they are perfect for that. There’s less post processing to do and the photos are still very nice. I think I’ll still come to look at recipes just for inspiration.

Frankly, I’m not even sure that my edits are better than the recipes I used most of the time. But I guess you’ve gotta fail sometimes to keep growing.

In the end, I think for the kind of art I want to create, I just have to do it the old fashioned way 🫠

You’re still here? Well then.

In the future of this newsletter expect just good ol fashioned rambling with photos, I guess.

Maybe one day I’ll be so fed up with my lack of talents and come back to the recipes 😬.

So yeah… Here I go, back to f*cking up my photos 🤷.

Cheers,

Peter.

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