Modern Negative Fujifilm Recipe

Film and digital — the best of both worlds in one recipe

Øyvind Nordhagen
6 min readSep 10, 2021
Camera JPG example of Modern Negative

Back in May this year I told you about a recipe I created named New American Color. I made it to mimic the look of Joel Sternfeld’s large format street portraits. To that end I would say i was fairly successful. As close as digital gets without post-processing anyway. A lot of other photographers seemed to enjoy it as well.

Using this recipe over the summer I have tried adjusting it a little and sometimes I would keep those adjustments in a separate custom bank and use that more than the original. Now, the original is probably more accurate to my original intention than what I’m presenting here. However I found that New American Color leans a little heavy towards a stylized look that only works for certain subjects and lighting conditions. I wanted to take what I loved about the first recipe and make something a little more versatile.

Those who follow me on Instagram will have noticed the name “New American Color MKll recipe" being used for some of my shots. This was the working title for Modern Negative. What it became however, is something inspired by certain attributes of New American Color, not a replacement for it. They serve different purposes so they deserve different names.

So what did I like about the…

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Øyvind Nordhagen

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