📸 Fuji Recipe EP3: Shooting old stuff with "Old Ektachrome" recipe

Images in this post were taken with Fujixweekly’s “Old Ektachrome” recipe.

Well hello there, and welcome back to the mediocre photography newsletter.

I didn’t get many good shots with this recipe (definitely no print worthy ones). I didn’t love the results I get (though I’m warming up to it), but maybe it’s just the impossible and unrealistic expectations I have for it.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

I was looking for film photos of my country during the 70s to 90s era. I have a lot of nostalgia for this era and the color films that came with it. In the 2000s, everyone I knew used to have binders of prints in their home, and I’d sit for hours going through them.

In my quest, I found this article, of which the photos are quite beautiful and faithful to my memory. I do remember seeing a lot of magenta shifts on film photos of the past, both on prints and online.

Those photos was shot by Geoffrey Hiller, using good old Kodachrome. Many of the images definitely possess that magenta shifts. They were also grainy and gritty, which I really like.

(Side note: These days I’m more interested in the “scenery” of the street and life, rather the pure, documentary style “street photography”, if that makes sense. Still, those images are very inspiring)

Anyways, all the Kodachrome recipes I found on Fujixweekly, and a bunch other recipe creators were a bit too “clean” for my taste. They were probably modeled after “optimal” results of Kodachrome. And while I respect that, I was looking for something else.

After more browsing around, I found the recipe that we’re talking about in this episode, “Old Ektachrome”. And my first impression is, this feels right.

Some of the photos on the page definitely have that “nostalgic feel”’ for me, which is a good start. The images leaned a bit colder (which I think is the big difference between Kodachrome and Ektachrome), but I don’t mind it that much. I kinda like it really.

(Another side note: This recipe feels a lot like the “Positive Film” preset on the Ricoh GR series, which I used a lot in the past!)

So I took the recipe, and I go out and wander on the streets of Hanoi.

I looked for old “things” and “scenes” to shoot, as I hope to find something that represents the images in my memory.

After hours of walking, I came back feeling a bit “disappointed” though. The images I saw on the back of my camera wasn’t very “inspiring”, which is not a great sign. But maybe it’s just because I’m a shit photographer 🤔.

I mostly expose for the highlights for this recipe, which usually means underexposing around 1 stops or more. (if only Fuji cameras have a “highlight weighted” metering mode. I sorely miss that from my Ricoh cameras, as I do love that look of letting the shadows fall dark).

Anyways, there’s one modification I made to the recipe: I switched from DR400 to DR Auto, as I think the compressed dynamic range might look nicer (Ektachrome/Kodachrome was a color reversal film after all), I guess I also heard Ektachrome actually handles highlights pretty well, so this might be a dumb change anyways.

Now that I look back, the images definitely have some of the “look” I was searching. It probably is just too tame for me (not enough color shifts, and definitely not enough noise/grain to get that “look”. Maybe I’ll shoot at 3200-12800 ISO next time. Yes, the blasphemy of intentionally shooting at high ISO.)

Maybe this is one of the things that I will have to cook myself again (although that probably won’t happen for a while. I’m still recovering from tearing all my hair using X-raw studio when I created my version of “Cinestill 800T”)

And that’s it. As always, subscribe to the newsletter to see more mediocre photos I took with different recipes. Next episode: Tri-X 400!