📸 Fujifilm Recipe EP6: Celine, an "experimental" recipe

Photos shot using Mehdi Berrada’s “Celine” recipe from film.recipes facebook group. Recipe below.

Do you hate sharpness? Or details? Ever wish your photos could look like if they were shot on a point and shoot in the 2000s?

No?… oh. Right.

Well, I kinda do. Sometimes anyways.

It’s probably because I’m on this ever ongoing, futile quest to makes my images look more “painterly”, so I’m open to try anything more “dramatic”.

The other day I saw this recipe from Mehdi in film.recipes facebook group (great place to hangout and see what people do with Fuji recipes btw).

He mentioned his friend’s instagram Celine, which I checked out, and loved the style.

Her work features a very noisy and gritty look, which this recipe tries to replicate.

This style is also quite popular with many Japanese street and “life” photographers (as I like to call it). I bought a book called Night Flight from an artist named Sakiko Nomura when I was in Japan a while ago, whom style is probably the closest I’ve seen. (I don’t have any affiliation to the site in the link, it’s the first thing I found online). And I thoroughly enjoyed the photos.

I’m sure there are easier ways to replicate this style though. As mentioned, digicams are one way. I have a bunch of them that I still use sometimes, and I love them.

But if you already have a Fuji camera and like to experiment, why not 😸.

A small warning: This recipe features an artificially high ISO value, so maybe don’t shoot anything important with it unless you’re absolutely sure you like the style. Unlike many other recipes, which if you don’t like, you can just re-edit the RAWs later, this is a one way street!

I shot this recipe on an evening before the Vietnamese’s Independence day around Hoan Kiem lake.

For this recipe, I was thinking of a more freeform, loosey goosey shooting experience. Motion blur, noise, out of focus are features, not bugs 🤣.

I used my XC 50-230mm for this little project to replicate the all in one telephoto lenses usually found in digicams.

I set ISO on 51200, manual focus on somewhere close to infinity, auto aperture and shutter speed, underexpose around 1 stop, and just shoot away anything remotely interesting.

Funnily enough, despite the “slow” aperture of this lens at night (only open up to 6.7 at the long end), iso 51200 is a lot, actually. I didn’t even get motion blur on many of these because there was too much light!

Basically I just replicated the whole digicam experience, because I like masochism or something, I guess.

As you’ve been looking at the photos, they are… not very good, to put it mildly. “Technically”, they are travesties.

But they are kinda a vibe.

The heavy orange cast makes images almost monochromatic. All the noise and grain and underexposure and contrasst makes images very gritty, which suits my style very well.

And sometimes, when you capture a good moment, all the imperfections “enhanced” the photo.

Would I do this again? Most likely not. I have my digicams already 😸. But it was fun! In the end that’s all that matters right?

Plus, I’ve started a new category of photos: Those that make me “feel” something. And the photos from this recipe are quite successful at that!

And that’s it. As always, subscribe to the newsletter to see more mediocre photos I took with different recipes. Next episode: An “invention” I made with dynamic range priority 😬.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post are affiliate links. You know the drill.