Since I re-started analogue photography a year and a half ago, my trusty Fujifilm X-T2 haven’t seen much action. I used it for the summer vacation, but apart from that it has almost not left the shelf.
The main reason for this is that I fell in love with film photography. The one thing that I always dreaded with digital photography was spending time on editing. I have a career where I spent more than enough time in front of a screen, so my hobby should not also put me in that position. Another reason is probably also that I was never really good at it.
But film photography “solved” this as scans from the lab always had a look “baked” in that I could just use as-is. I had played around a lot with film simulations for the X-T2 and found/made some that worked well in certain situations but never ones that gave a consistent look that I really loved.
The look that really speaks to me is somewhat vintage and grainy. Digital images usually ends up being to “clinical” to my taste.
But after Fujifilm released the Classic Negative film simulation I started seeing digital pictures that actually spoke to me and were a lot closer to my taste. The downside of discovering that new feature is of course that it is not offered by my old X-T2. Luckily however I am not the only person in this World that like the look of Classic Negative and has an “old” camera – so someone cleverly re-engineered the Classic Negative film simulation as a “style” for Capture One that you can apply to your images to get close to the same look as the original Classic Negative offered by newer Fujifilm cameras.
After playing around with this style preset and other “film-like” styles I ended up with a combination of settings that I could apply to the raw files of my X-T2 and produce images that I just really love.
Nørrebro
Today I took my X-T2 for a walk around Copenhagen as I had some errands and shot the images I will show here. I cannot remember ever being so satisfied with a look out of digital images. They are just so characterful which is something I never thought I would say of digital images.
But enough of me praising myself. It is difficult enough for myself to listen to – so I can fully understand your aversion.
Let’s have a look at the images instead.
First one here above I really like the reds! There is actually a lot of red in the images below, but one thing this “style” does is really to enhance and reds in a nice and “vintage” way.
I am not totally sure I will use this image for anything else than highlight the look. But perhaps. It actually grew a little on me just from editing it to a few hours later including it here in this blog post – so perhaps with a bit of time it will earn a spot.
I cannot tell you why, but I really like this shot. It is busier than what I would normally like, but somehow it just works for me.
Jacobsens garden
These two are from Carlsberg city and people who know Copenhagen will also be aware that I am jumping around a bit as I will post another shot from Nørrebro (which the first 3 was) below. But as everything is blossoming currently it would be almost rude not to include a picture with some blossoming trees. I really like the tones and colors of these.
Favorites
This images was shot before noon and was sure it was going to be the best image I would shoot at least all day, but perhaps this month. I really like the juxtaposition of white flowers and barbed wire. It really encompasses opposites. But low and behold a few hours later I would shoot the image shown below that now really competes for at least the best of the day but perhaps even best of month.
So while this is a totally different image than the one above it somehow just reminds me of pictures I have seen from the past. There is just something really vintage and moody about this that I have fallen totally in love with. It is busy and crops the top part of a pole, but for me it just really works. It is soft, has nice texture and beautiful tones. Everything I would expect from an old analogue film scan. But this came out of my X-T2 some hours ago.
It is safe to say that the X-T2 will not be collecting dust on the shelf in the coming months, now I need to try my way at different scenes, perhaps tweak it even more to my liking. But boy do I have a good starting point. These images from this post delivers everything I currently want out of photography. They really speak to me.