field notes & essays

A friend told me to try the Kodak Portra family of recipes on Fuji X Weekly. I put it off for a while because I had a workflow I was comfortable with. Then one afternoon I loaded Portra 800 v3 onto the X-M5 and went out for a walk. I have not gone back since.

What strikes me first is the skin tone rendering. There is a softness to it that feels genuinely analog, not the kind of softness that means unsharp, but the kind that means forgiving and warm. It handles mixed light better than anything else I have tried on this camera.

The grain adds texture without noise. At 800 ISO it starts to look like actual film, which is the whole point. I had been fighting high ISO for months and this recipe made me embrace it.

The Portra family has a few variants and they are all worth cycling through. 400 is cleaner and more neutral. 160 is beautiful in flat light. But 800 v3 is the one I keep returning to. My friend was right. I should have listened sooner.

For a while I thought I was getting the most out of my X-M5 because I was switching between film simulations. Classic Negative for street. Velvia when the light was good. Eterna when I wanted something muted. That is not the same thing as using recipes, and I wish someone had told me sooner.

A film simulation is just one ingredient. A recipe is the whole thing: simulation, grain, highlight and shadow tone, colour chrome, sharpness, all dialled in together to produce a specific look. The difference in the final image is significant. I had been driving with one gear.

Fuji X Weekly is a game changer for this. Ritchie Roesch has been publishing recipes for years and the app makes them easy to browse, save, and dial in. The part that won me over is the camera filter. You can search only for recipes that work on your specific body, so nothing you find will have settings your camera does not support. For X-M5 owners that matters because not every recipe built for older bodies translates directly.

I loaded three recipes in one sitting and went out to shoot. The results felt more intentional than anything I had produced by reaching for a simulation alone. If you have been doing what I was doing, the app is worth your time.