What I shot with on my trip to Jiuzhaigou, China

Hello friends,

Sorry I’ve been ghosting you for a while. There has been some stuff going on with my life, which I’ll not go into here. I’ve also been contemplating a big change with my photography, which I’ll probably detail in the next post. So, there’s that.

I’ve written most of this post before all this, but procrastinated on finishing it. So… yeah. There’s that too.

I initially wanted to share the stories of my trip to Jiuzhaigou, China with my family. I have written out many long and boring paragraphs. But it turned out quite boring with a bunch of negative energy. So here’s a quick recap, I guess:

Bad trip organizer, too many people literally everywhere all the time, too much time in the bus, too many “shopping” places so organizers can earn commission, stomachache, night sweats, and diarrhea.

I guess there’s only so much to expect when the cost of the whole trip was quite low.

There, all caught up. Now we can move on to the little photography I got to do.

The photography

The landscape was… nice, I guess.

Jiuzhaigou is, in all honesty, pretty stunning, despite the off season. There’s just too little time and too many people around, and the rigid “run by the mill” locations we were brought to doesn’t help. If I could just, idk, take off by myself with a bicycle or something for a day, I would. But alas, here we are.

I could only imagine what happens if we went here on season… Yup, MORE PEOPLE.

Frankly, I’m not feeling most of the photos I took here either. I took quite a lot of photos, and looking back maybe I liked like 1% of them. Maybe it’s just because I have no vision, skills or talents 🤷. But alas, here we are.

We were only in Jiuzhaigou for around 2 days. The rest is spent mostly visiting touristy places in Chengdu and go to the commissioned shopping places. I snuck off here and there to go take photos on the street, which are probably some of the better ones I took here.

Those are mostly taken with Fujixweekly’s Kodachrome 64, which I might or might not write a separate post on.

I also used a few other recipes on this trip. The most prominent one is the overexposed Portra recipe you might have read about here.

So… here’s the best of the rest.

Cinematic Pro Neg from film.recipes

This is a recipe that I’m pleasantly surprised about. The photos Justin showed looks quite nice, but it being Pro Neg Std based, I was never too interested. Maybe it was because the Pro Neg base sims always looked kinda too “normal” for me.

This recipe has flipped that script in my head. The colors are warm and pastel, with interesting color shifts. It’s quite stylized and “cinematic”, so the namesake delivered I guess. Skin tones are quite beautiful. I’m also digging the high key, pastel look a lot more these days, especially on sunny days.

I’d love to shoot this recipe more, but the dreary grey winter seems to have finally come in the North of Vietnam. I prefer colder tones in winter, so I guess this recipe will have to wait around a bit more.

Fujixweekly’s Tmax 100 soft tone

This is a new black and white recipe I was testing out. Black and white recipes are weird to me because the B&W recipes I tried all perform pretty well, but I always wonder if it “can be better”.

B&W recipes are a bit weird for me to talk about as well. There’s no color, so B&W recipes mostly differ in contrast level.

Oh and this uses the +Green mode, which is supposedly making skin tones better, but I have little interest in that though 😬. I prefer the classic dark sky of the +Red modes. Still, this recipe makes some pretty cool photos sometimes.

I find myself “finetuning” my B&W photos in post a lot more anyways, as I think B&W photos can become a lot more beautiful with the “creative exposure” and contrast adjustment in post, sometimes a bit of dodging and burning, and sometimes a bunch of negative clarity and dehaze.

Oh and sometimes I just casually flip a color photo to B&W (either to one of the sims in camera, or just flip the jpeg to B&W in Lightroom) if I think it looks better that way.

I do prefer the B&W output of Tri-X 400 recipe and Ilford Hp5 recipe though. They are much nicer out of the box than my raw B&W edits, which is saying something about my skills, I guess 🫠.

So… yeah.

Nighttime recipes.

I mostly used Fujixweekly’s Fluorescent Night recipes on this trip. It was ok. I wasn’t really happy with any nighttime recipes I tried lately though.

I may have a separate post about this topic, but I guess it’s just because nighttime colors and contrast are a bit unpredictable. I find it quite hard to get something I like with any color recipes.

Feels like I usually get a lot better results with black and white at night. I don’t want to “just” shoot B&W at night though.

Anyways, I find Fluorescent Night delivers on some of the colors I like at night (lots of green, blue and teal). It’s still not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess I don’t know what I have in mind either 🤷.

It’s a “X-Trans V” exclusive recipe btw, but I heard Nostalgic Negative is just Eterna with like +3 Shadows in a trench coat or something, so,… yeah 😂.

I’ve created a few nighttime looks that I also ended up tossing in the bin as well. It’s just feel kind hard to make a cool night recipe without split toning. Maybe I’ll talk about it one day 🫠.

So… yeah, that’s it.

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

Disclaimer: Some links in the post might be affiliate links. You know the drill. Oh and please click them links. Costs you nothing and I’ll make a few cents here and there when you purchase anything from Amazon 🥲 .