Joel Meyerowitz Fujifilm Recipe

Standing on the shoulder of a giant

Øyvind Nordhagen
5 min readNov 7, 2022
Untitled. Oslo August 2022

Throughout the summer I happily shot with OWH Film for everything. I still shoot a lot with it, but using fixed white balance got me thinking about serendipity. The fact that certain things are best left uncorrected because then it better represents a mood, even if some things are “wrong”. I have never been good at deliberately adjusting my images to anything but “correct”. That’s why I love playing with Fujifilm recipes.

Joel Meyerowitz is one of the all time great street photographers. His work was well known to me, but I saw one of his images one day and I couldn’t move on. This one:

Joel Meyerowitz: New York City, 1974

It’s one of Meyerowitz’ classics and it so well represents a point in history in New York. Aside from the great situational awareness and intuitive composition skills he’s showing here, I stopped to think about the color palette. I wondered if I could recreate something like this in camera, so I tried.

Distilling the look

I looked at many of Meyerowitz’ known images and I realised that his images are all over the place in terms of “look”. It’s a well-known fact that…

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Øyvind Nordhagen
Øyvind Nordhagen

Written by Øyvind Nordhagen

Photographer based in Oslo. I write about photographic technique and editing.