Film Recipes for Fujifilm Cameras

Nostalgic, soft tone and vintage film recipes using Fujifilm film simulations

Safari Chrome, for African Explorations

A Classic Chrome film recipe designed for outdoor shooting and natural colour

From time to time, I get asked whether I might be able to make a film simulation recipe for certain situations, or to macth the work of a photographer or social gallery. I do enjoy these challenges, although it’s not always possible to acheive the look in question with jsut a film recipe.

A similar challenge came my way when I was discussing an upcoming safari trip with our of our Facebook club members. David Forsdike was due to travel to South Africa, and wanted some ideas for a recipe to use for wildlife phtoography. He has X-Trans V cameras and had bagged a new zoom lens for the trip.

My thoughts on this were two fold. Firstly, I was new to X-Trans V, having only recently upgraded to an X-S20, which uses a hybrid of the series IV sensor and series V processing and simulations. I didn’t yet have many RAW files to experiment on, or full confidence in how X-Trans V recipes might look. Secondly, I’ve not visited South Africa, so it was hard to be sure what conditions David might find there. I’ve seen episodes of Wild Earth on YouTube, which was a clue that we’d be dealing with dawn or dusk, but also possibly some hard sunlight too.

So, I decided a new recipe would be best, developed on my X-S20 and in X RAW Studio. I wanted something that didn’t make strong changes to the images, because the star should be the wild animals, rather than the tone or mood form the recipe. This was also important so that they remained true colour, so we avoid any orange leopards or pink elephants that might otherwise look odd.

I picked Classic Chrome as the base simulation and I chose to add a little film like tone with a -3 shift for Blue. Classic Chrome is naturally desaturated, so I boost colour by 2 steps to bring back some of the vibrancy. For the lower light flexibility and protection in harsh conditions, I paired DR400 with -1 highlights and shadows. This should give a bit more shadow detail and soften the harsh light.

Below is my Safari Chrome recipe, which David took to South Africa. As you’ll see, he was lucky and saw a wide variety of impressive wildlife, and also captured some compelling scenes in a local market. My guess of hard sunlight, didn’t come to pass on the game drives, but the natural colour and soft shoadows approach for the recipe, produced a natural result and I think his images look great!