THE CULT OF FUJI - PART THREE

 FEBRUARY 14, 2025

                                                                  The Cult of Fuji appears on Division Street

This week I would like to finish my discussion of my recent purchase of a new/old camera, the 2016 Fuji X-T3, and my realization that I had joined yet another commercial cult. I have always known that Apple was no doubt a cult, but I reasoned that at least the products actually worked, as opposed to the other computers I encountered when teaching post-processing classes. I joined the cult of Volvo when I bought an old Volvo station wagon as the best alternative for transporting all my stuff to Saturday Market. I only gradually realized that every Volvo owner in Portland had the absolutely “best” Volvo mechanic to fix their automotive obsession. My own “best” mechanic finally told me that while my 2001 model was certainly a fine vehicle, he would no longer fix it. I was not rich enough to continue investing money in the car. He said the next vehicle I should buy should be one where I didn’t know my mechanic’s name. I promptly bought another Volvo, but wouldn’t admit it to my mechanic for almost a year.

                It's easy to achieve simple black and white conversions like this in camera - even subtle black and white variations including grain.

Fuji is another company that I now realize is really a cult. It makes really fine cameras, but that doesn’t seem to fit its customers absolute devotion to the brand. I knew I was buying a camera that fit my needs very well, and that I faced quite a learning curve in mastering technologies that represented a decade of advances beyond my old Canon, even though I was buying a used camera nearly a decade behind the times.

                                                                 More drastic changes of a Fuji Raw File can easily be achieved in Lightroom.

The camera was almost built for me. It was designed in such a traditional manner, despite its new technologies, that it was in some ways even more “old school” than my old camera. It has more “analog” dials and buttons than my old Canon. Even though it is built like a tank, with substantial metal components along with the inevitable plastic, it is clearly half the size and weight of my old camera. I had to buy a small “extender” for the camera so that I could securely grip the body. Fuji actually makes a zoom lens that is almost exactly the same as my old Canon lens that fit my needs like a glove for almost twenty years. I have nothing but praise for its build quality. My overall feeling that these people certainly know what they are doing. It is a quality product.

                                      Another simple scene on Division Street. While most of these changes could be achieved in camera, it's a lot easier in Lightroom. The trouble with most Fuji film simulation discussions on the Web is that a scene like this is considered a really fine image.

But I am an old goat. My old camera’s “menu” was so primitive and generally meaningless that I only really consulted it to reformat my memory card after a day of shooting. The Fuji’s menu is so long that I grow weary just looking at it, even though I skip entire sections devoted to flash photography. I don’t even know most of the terms contained in the multiple pages devoted to video controls. I discovered that there were at least three different ways to avoid using the menus, but I couldn’t master them as well. It was not much comfort when I learned that part of the Fuji mystique was its superior menu layout as compared to other modern cameras - I could only shudder at the thought.

                                      As the "before" shot shows, it's pretty easy to mess up the white balance on a film simulation in camera. This black and white conversion is much easier in Lightroom than in camera, even though Fuji lets you shoot square images in camera - but that's not the same as straightened and cropped images.

I went on Amazon and bought a highly regarded guide to a ten-year old camera. I also downloaded the official owners manual, which only proved that Japanese to English translations had not really improved in the last twenty years. I followed the advice I give all my students, reading through these guides slowly with camera in hand so as to really understand the camera’s layout and controls. While I have built up some muscle memory, it has been a very slow process. A big part of the problem was the almost infinite way that you can set up the camera - almost a dozen dials and buttons can be configured in multitude ways that have nothing to do with the labels on the camera body. Just like in the grocery store, infinite choice led to paralysis. Frustration mounted when I would realize that my careful decisions had been changed by an inadvertent digit on one of the buttons.

                                                                  The Fujifilm film simulations can be transformative, but certainly not on the fly. You need Lightroom for this kind of stuff, which allows this skategurl to emerge from the darkness.

This was my first clue that I had joined a cult. Once the algorithms realized that I had bought a Fuji, I was bombarded by nearly a dozen experts who all had ironclad systems for properly “setting up” the camera. The fact that they contradicted each other wasn’t the problem - it was that the camera was so complex that it lent itself to such discussions. The process of using a camera to actually take photographs had become so fetishized that it seemed more important than the images themselves. I’ve finally come to adopt a strategy that embraces an almost fully manual ethos that ignores almost all of the controls that promised to make my life easier. I add a new control only when I truly understand how it will help, and am no longer disappointed when I forget how to use it a few days later. I’ve also learned that most of the commentary on Fuji on the web even funnier than most web memes. People take this stuff very seriously indeed, and the comments sections frequently devolve even farther than those on news sites. One of the biggest Fuji sites is literally called “Fuji Rumors.” I’m trying not to make fun - respect must be shown to someone who has been posting almost continuously for seven years. I am writing a blog after all. Yet note that this website is not even mostly about current or past Fuji products, but is devoted to projections about future products! Rumors are of course forgotten as easily as politician’s promises once a new product is actually introduced.

                                       The Fuji Film Simulation provided the initial super-contrasty black and white. I could then crop and darken the edges in Lightroom

The other facet of the Fuji cult that I had not anticipated is that a big part of the cult actually is based on the idea that these cameras are designed to eliminate post processing. Readers of this blog realize that I fully embrace the computer and do not think that an image is complete until you have put your stamp on it in Lightroom. While you can certainly shoot in Raw and import your Raw files into Lightroom, a big part of the Fuji ethos is to rely on Fuji “color science” to post-process your images into baked-in jpegs right in the camera.

                                      Lightroom required to build upon the Fuji film recipe.

These jpegs are romantically called “film simulations” and are supposedly based on their chemically forbears found in Fujifilm film emulsions developed before most hipsters were born. The idea is that these “looks” will relieve any need to work on the computer since the camera’s computer has done all of the work already. The entire promise of digital photography was based on the idea that a little work after the fact could allow a photographer to have more control of the image than they had ever been able to achieve in the darkroom. The idea that “presets” could provide some guidance was not as an end product, but as a starting point. A jpeg “straight out of camera” is as big a dead end as film’s adherents mystical belief that chemical film profiles cannot be duplicated in a computer program.

                This kind of black and white manipulation is way beyond the Fuji film simulation it started in "straight out of camera."

The cult deepens. Just like photographers like myself cajoled Adobe into advancing Lightroom way beyond their dreams, Fujifilm has opened a pandora’s box deep in those menus. They allowed photographers to modify their own Fuji simulations. The nearly two dozen “film simulations” available from Fuji were now just the tip of the iceberg. Enthusiasts have gone on to develop and promote these “recipes” for fun and profit. Another venerable website is Fuji-X Weekly, with another seven years of blogposts (wow!) that promote these recipes. There are now more than 250 of these “you’ve got to try recipes.” Obviously another example of the promise of simplicity transforming into another cult of infinite choice. Most of the time it seems even easier to just return to post-processing in Lightroom.

                                                                  It can be scary indeed what a few minutes can achieve in Lightroom. There was not much promise in the original snapshot of a Halloween remnant in a Division Street apartment window four flights up.

The trouble is that these recipes require a return to the camera’s menus. Programming a recipe requires changing about a dozen parameters in the menu, naming a recipe and then saving it in the camera. The camera’s computer is so sophisticated that it controls the simulation. In order to view your efforts on a larger screen in Fuji’s computer program for your laptop, you literally have to run a cable from the camera to the computer. I kid you not.

Now this photographer, like most men, has to admit that I am colorblind to some degree. But with 250 recipes and counting, most of this “color science” is subtle indeed. Especially when the inspiration for most of them is to achieve a mystical “film look” from days gone by. The parameters for the Fuji recipe modifications abandon any numerical scales common in any other post-processing programs - sometimes even the positive and negative directions seem to be reversed. All in all the film simulations appear to be a “black box” that I haven’t come close to breaking. Most of the images shown in this essay could start as a film simulation. and It might even be fun to see them on the camera’s rear screen while shooting. Yet I think you will easily see that my final images cannot be achieved “straight out of camera.” You don’t have to like them - but don’t pretend that any camera can do it all, even if it has “Fujifilm”on the front.

I hope you can see that a quick snap on a street can become a much more graphic image after a little post processing. "Straight out of camera" might be required for a photo in the New York Times, but not in your portfolio.