Photo gear shenanigans

I started preparing my photo gear for the trip. I went with the camera to a botanical garden nearby my home to shoot some flowers and ornaments to test the camera. I went down the rabbit hole that is Fujifilm’s recipes.

In case you haven’t heard - Fujifilm is trying to simulate quite a few of their film products. It’s a bit more than a filter, but it changes how the JPEG file looks like by processing the raw image. Depending on a specific camera you have there’s a few of different simulations you can try. You can also tweak them to better match your expected effect.

The Fuji community has come up with a concept of recipe. A few people have doubled down on that tweaking concept to recreate the plethora of other emulsions by modifying the parameters of the photo processing and share the configurations, better known as “recipes”.

So this is what I wanted to test. I chose a few that looked cool, including Kodachrome 64, and went to the park. Some of those recipes look very over the top. They’re often more extreme than the base film simulations themselves. However, Kodachrome 64 is not like the others. It’s distinctive in how it renders the reds, but it stays relatively tame with everything else. I like this one a lot and I’m surely going to try it in Japan.

One of the things I noticed today is that there’s something stuck in the lens 😭. I wanted to take a picture of a rainbow before my flight to Netherlands (yes, I’m traveling a lot lately). There’s a few dark spots on any picture I shoot, always in the same places. I don’t see it in the optical viewfinder, so it’s gotta be either in the lens (very bad news) or on the sensor (moderately bad news). I’m writing this while riding the train to Warsaw, so I will be able to check the camera properly later. I really hope it’s just some dirt on the sensor.