📸 Shooting Hue, Vietnam with Fujifilm jpeg recipes, ft Reggie's Portra, Moody Hanoi, and more

Recipes used: Reggie’s Portra, Moody Hanoi, Tri-X 400, Old Ektachrome, and more in the post!

This image is available on my print shop here

Hello friends,

Welcome back to the photography magazine where I f*ck around with Fujifilm’s SOOC jpegs and pretend that I know what I’’m doing.

In this issue, I’m not reviewing any single recipes (although there’s a bunch of new stuff in here). Instead I’m taking you through a short trip I had and the photos I took with many different recipes!

This is actually not the first time you see photos of my trip to Hue. I have a bunch of photos in this location shot with Old Ektachrome and Tri-X 400. But these are a the rest of them.

My trip to Hue was rather a short one: only 2 days plus the first night on the train, plus the final morning before we get to the airport. Half the time was spent at a resort called “Villa Louise” (which is pretty cool to be honest, we’ll get to that).

Yet, I shot over 2000 photos on this trip, some of which are my favorite ever!

Again, a few of those are on the Tri-X 400 post. I also really liked this shot using Old Ektachrome at the Perfume River.

Anyways, let’s start from the beginning.

The first night

I took the train with my wife and my in laws from Hanoi, which took over 12 hours. I had the 35mm f1.4 on my camera, and the 15-45 “kit lens” in my bag for the trip. Though in a last minute, “spur of the moment” decision, I decided to do a switcheroo and put the 15-45 on (which would then stayed on for the whole trip).

I wanted to shoot the interiors of the train with a wide angle lens, and there’s a few situations that it’s going to come in handy too. The 15-45 is also quite underrated, because of its “kit” lens status and slow apertures, and I wanted to change that.

And what a great decision it was since I then shot this banger, right on the first hour of the train ride.

This shot wasn’t on 15mm, but my 35mm would have been way too tight for this.

If anything, you can treat this lens as a 15mm f3.5 “almost ultra” wide angle lens (comes about 22.5mm in ff equivalent), and the rest is just bonus flexibility. 22.5mm is pretty much all the wide angle I’ll ever need, considering I usually shoot with a 40 or 50 equivalent focal length.

Also, here’s a fun fact: the Fuji 14mm f2.8 is around $900 brand new, the 16mm f2.8 is $399, and this 15mm f3.5 lens is less than 100 bucks and/or it comes with your camera. Think about that for a moment taps head.

Anyways I shot these photos on the train at night with Moody Hanoi, my personal Cinestill 800T recipe. I really love the teal look instead of pure white on white bulbs, since I kinda hate how pure white bulb lights look normally.

The next morning,

I wanted to continue testing the Old Ektachrome recipe. I thought it would look good on old things and scenery, which I had hoped the city of Hue would be.

The shots I made, color wise, were kinda uninspiring when looking from the camera’s LCD though. The green just doesn’t pop as much in Classic Chrome compared to Classic Negative’s recipes, and the city has lots of greenery. So I kinda gave up on it after half a day.

I did find a nice “discovery” though. I tried swapping Classic Chrome into Classic Negative for one photo, and I got a surprisingly nice, nostalgic color palette. I think I’ll dig deeper into shooting with this “happy accident” down the line!

The skin tones of Old Ektachrome also weren’t very flattering (they were fine, but a bit too moody for a “lighthearted” trip with family), and I wanted to deliver more “pleasing” portraits, so I switched back to Reggie’s Portra as the “default” recipe, as I know it will most likely deliver, at least in the portrait department.

Though later on that day, I shot some more cityscapes photo with Reggie’s Portra and found them kinda uninspiring and underwhelming. It doesn’t help that we’re blazing through locations in harsh mid day lighting. The foliage all over the city, again, just doesn’t really “pop” with Classic Chrome recipes (which Classic Neg really excels at).

… So when I’m back looking at the photos shot using Reggie’s Portra on my laptop, I wanted to do “something” about the boring greens. Something “radical”...

Enter “Aerochrome”!

I found a bunch of Lightroom tutorials a white ago on how to do “Aerochrome” in Lightroom, and I tweaked to make my own version and saved the steps to a preset. It was mostly based on this youtube video though.

With all the jpeg options Fujifilm gave us, still, it just wasn’t possible out-of-camera at all. And Photoshop is just too annoying for me to work with. The “Lightroom” method isn’t flawless, but it’s the faster and most straight forward method, on the software I’m already using to view, crop and tweak my jpegs.

So… yeah. There are a bunch of photos I liked that has a lot of greenery. I just apply the preset over the jpegs (mostly reggie’s portra jpegs) and modify the color temperature and tints until the greens are just right. Yes I edit jpegs. Sue me 🤣.

You can do raws. It’s probably better, but I’m just lazy like that though. I never even import raws into Lightroom. Sometimes they go to X raw studio, but most of the time they just go to my archive drive.

Anyways, these faux Aerochromes turned out a lot better than I thought it would. Some colors are a bit “inaccurate”, and sometimes the reds bled over to other parts of the scene (compared to real Aerochrome). Though it’s not like we shoot “Aerochrome” for “accurate colors” in the first place anyways.

I’m definitely adding this “trick” to my bags of tricks, when there’s a lot of green!

The black and white spark.

As we speedrun-ed (speedran? idk) through locations, I faced this dilemma: harsh mid day sun can be annoying AF. Lucky me, I had loaded the Tri-X 400 recipe into one of the slots, “just in case”. And thank god for that decision.

(Though I like B&W, I just love colors too much to do B&W more often)

I already told this story on my Tri-X post though, so I won’t bore you again. Check that out to see my B&W shots in Hue.

I will say, looking at B&W on site, rather than convert color photos into B&W later definitely has its perks. Seeing in B&W really makes you appreciate the contrast between things!

The evening…

was rather uneventful photography wise.

We had dinner and a few drinks, and go to bed early, as there are 2 young children around. And the 14 hour train ride and the constant location hopping earlier was a biatch for all of us.

The restaurant was quite nice though, and I couldn’t resist taking my camera around for a bit and shoot with my Cinestill recipe.

I love this shot above, even though it kinda looks nothing special. It kinda evokes some feeling though. I’m dead inside so feeling anything at all is nice.

The third day

We went to the resort and stayed there for the next day and the final morning. The architecture is quite nice and I shot many photos of the place.

Though there’s a bunch of green stuff here as well, so I ended up converted a bunch to Aerochrome anyways.

This image is available on my print shop here

At night though, the location transformed to this beautiful dark, ambient, and moody place. And I shot this Edward Hopper-esque certified banger here using my Cinestill recipe!

This image is available on my print shop here

Oh and allow me to introduce you to yet another side character of this trip: Redscale.

“Redscale” is the process of reversing the a color negative film stock and exposing the back instead of the front.

There are many different redscale “looks”, because, well, reversing different stocks led to different results. The main characteristics are usually the red/orange/yellow palette, aka the “Bladerunner 2049 desert wasteland special”.

And just like film, there are many different “Redscale” looks you can create on your Fujifilm cameras. I didn’t even stick with one “recipe” in this post. (I redeveloped some of the files in camera, and I just switched the base recipe until I like the outcome).

I think Fuji X raw studio would be great for this process. If it wasn’t so goddamn sluggish, I would probably use it more often.

At some point in the last days, I felt kinda “stuck” creatively. So I switched to “Redscale” occasionally to “see the world in a new way”

Anyways, here’s my “Redscale recipe”, or at least the things they have in common:

• White Balance: 10000K, R+9 B-5

• DR100

• Highlights +1, Shadows +3

• Sharpness -2

• ISO NR -4

• Grain: Strong, Large

• Color Chrome FX/Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong, Strong

• Color: This depends on the base sim, but usually +4 for me.

And then the base sim is usually either Classic Chrome, Eterna Bleach Bypass, or Velvia for me. Although I’m really digging the Eterna Bleach Bypass look with this!

This is one of the few occasions where I felt like I should have had thought about it a bit more though. I was using my usual run and gun setup where I just leave Auto ISO at 6400. This image though could have benefited from a cleaner noise profile. It was shot at f3.5, 1/40s, and with OIS and shooting at the widest end, I definitely could have shot this at 1/10 or even 1/5. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Funnily enough, for a brief moment I wished I had a f2.8 constant lens (sigma 18-50 for example). But then I realized that that’s only half a stop more light vs f3.5, and I wouldn’t have had OIS for the possibility of doing 1/10!

Anyways, If you like the redscale look, try experimenting with all the settings until you find what you like!

The final morning

It seems like I was kinda disappointed with Reggie’s Portra for most of this trip, so here’s the redemption arc:

I woke up early to catch some early sunrise on the beach (yes, this resort has a beach front. It’s super quiet too since there’s a graveyard not too far away from this resort, and Vietnamese people are very superstitious). That’s when I shot the photo above and this:

This image is available on my print shop here

Ooooof. These 2 photos slap. I came so hard when I see them 😏. These pastel tones might as well come from real Portra itself. These images made me fall in love with this recipe again!

And that’s it.

I got on the flight home shortly after on this morning. I shot a bunch of clouds and aerial photos on the plane, but that’s about it.

There’s not really anything to write home about, except the aerial “Redscale” image earlier, which looks pretty nice. Oh and the crocodile cloud photo on my Tri-X post.

This trip was a smashing success for me, as I got some bangers in my book. Hope you enjoyed the photos as well.

Again, all of these were shot with the Fuji XC 15-45mm “kit” lens. Don’t sleep on this lens that you probably already have.

As always, subscribe to the newsletter to see more mediocre photos I took with Fujifilm recipes.

I’m experimenting with some wild (and some vile stuff 😂). So stay tuned for that!

Next episode: “Celine” by Mehdi Berrada (film.recipes facebook group)!

A few more photos

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