📸 Fujifilm Recipe EP11: My “6 stops Overexposed Portra” recipe

Photos in this post were shot using Justin Gould’s Portra 160 recipe with my modifications below.

This photo is available on my print shop here

Hello friends,

Today I’ve got quite an exciting recipe to share with you. 

It started as the usual for me, binging a video of the goat grainydays.

In it he shot a bunch of stuff on Route 66 with Portra 400 film. But it’s not just normal Portra. It’s “very very overexposed Portra” (he probably post processed the photos to enhance the look as well).

Anyways, I love the look of it. It’s very pastel and airy. Almost like a flat color illustration/drawing.

So I set out on a quest trying to replicate the look, and luckily I don’t have to work very hard for this.

Let’s get started!

The recipe

For the base of this look, I want something with an Eterna base. I’ve been quite impressed with the Eterna film simulation lately from shooting with this Kodacolor recipe. It has a softer colors and contrast base from the get go. The color shifts are subtle but it’s quite pleasing. The blues shift to teal which I love, and the reds do pop pretty nicely.

The teal-ish blue makes this a very nice base for a Portra recipe, since the sky already comes out quite close.

I actually don’t have to work very hard for this recipe in the end, so that’s nice.

What I did is I browsed my favorite film simulation recipe website for Eterna based recipes. And lo and behold, Justin kinda got me covered already with his “Portra 160” recipe.

It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s close enough. I just modify it with what I wanted in my mind, which is -2 highlights, and bump the grain up to strong, small.

…

And then all that’s left is to overexpose the crap out of it to bring up the pastel midtones. 

I usually overexpose at least 1-stop on this recipe, sometimes a bit more.

Honestly, this makes me feel terrible, overexposing digital shots. 

I think we’re more or less subconsciously trained to protect the highlights for digital cameras by now. The typical consensus of “blown highlights = automatically bad” doesn’t help.

Recently though I’ve been a lot more open to things. James Popsys talks about overexposure on one of his (videos) as well. 

I’ve always been more open to crushed shadows than blown highlights though. I guess now the scales are balanced 🤷.

So... anyways, how’s the result?

I think it works pretty well!

Obviously my first thing that I do is taking this recipe out on the streets of Hanoi, and I did do that. 

It’s not quite the “overexposed Portra” look that’s usually associated with, well, mostly wedding photographers, but I’m not in the business of shooting weddings, so it’s whatever to me. I think that look overall features a bit more warm and “creamy” colors anyways, and this recipe leans a bit cool and green.

There will always be debates about what really is the “look” of a film stock, especially popular ones like Kodak Portra or Gold. I prefer not to add to those conversation, because tbh, it’s kinda pointless. A stock can have many different looks on its own. It’s a lot better to think of recipes as Inspirations, rather than Imitations, I think. Some people miss the point and just argue on the internet all day about whether a recipe is “accurate”. Rant over🤷

Anyways, we just never seem to see a blue sky in Hanoi though, and I wanted to see more of that with this recipe. Luckily I was invited to an upcoming trip for a few days to some places in Chengdu, China (stay tuned for more on that). So this recipe became one of the starting lineup in this trip.

This recipe works best with a lot of sunlight, but it’s surprisingly good in night time as well. I guess it’s because of the cooler white balance and the slight green shifts. Blue and green just always seem to be the cheat code for night photography.

This is quite a low contrast recipe, so photos can look quite flat. I tried shooting it in overcast conditions, really didn’t like the result. Luckily we have 7 slots for recipes to use in different conditions (I’m writing a post about this as well, stay tuned for that!).

I love shooting with sunlight though, so there’s that. Blue hour, golden hour, harsh midday, whatever. I love shooting whatever the sun shines on. 

(My second favorite time to shoot is at night, but I’m usually too tired by then, and my priority is just to relax on my comfortable chair and play video games, so... 🤷)

For this recipe, I think the less clutter on the image, the better the results. You can’t hide stuff on the shadow, unlike a more contrasty recipe like my Harman Phoenix 200 recipe, so you have to hide the craps some other ways.

Did I mention you need to overexpose a lot? 

I don’t think it’s the look if I’m not on the edge of burning all your highlight to ashes. Which is exciting and terrifying at the same time.

... Which is also ok for me I guess, since I could always use more excitement in my dull ass life as well.

Side effects might include color fringing (happens often when you overexpose and bring down the highlights), but if you squint hard enough you could say it’s just free halations 🤷.

Oh and portraits look pretty nice, but I’m not a portrait shooter, so take my word with a grain of 8×10 film sheet 🤷.

And what else is there to say? I like it. This might replace Reggie’s Portra as my “backup do everything” recipe, but I’m not sure it’s that versatile. Though I don’t really use the “backup recipe” anymore. Again, I’m writing a post about how I use my 7 slots to cover all the different occasions, so subscribe if you haven’t to see that soon™️.

Some more photos 

… And that’s it

As always, subscribe to the newsletter to see more mediocre photos I took with different recipes. Check out my Instagram/Threads if you’re into that shit.

Next episode: Either film.recipes’ Cine Pro, Fujixweekly’s Fluorescent Night, or Fujixweekly’s Kodachrome 64. Guess you just have to subscribe to find out 🤷.

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