OWH Darkness Fujifilm recipe for the darkest of days

To make great pictures in darkness with just a little artificial light you need serious contrast and noise control. This recipe is the best you can do to your JPGs in that situation.

Øyvind Nordhagen
6 min readNov 30, 2022
Nightscape at Grünerløkka, November 2022. Fujifilm X-E4/Fujinon 18mm f2 OWH Darkness recipe. Unedited.

It’s November here in Norway as I write this. November is miserable in many ways, but most of all it’s when the natural light is at its low point. The beautiful warm, glowing fall light of September and October is long gone, daylight hours are few, and the Christmas lights of December (possibly even white snow on the ground) is still to come. What do you do if you still want to shoot on the street? Especially if you’re like me and you have a day job?

The answer is you have to deal with the darkness in constructive ways and chase whatever light you can find. This is my third winter in Norway as a street photographer and let me tell you that it’s a hard time to be an opportunist on the street with a camera. It’s the same amount of time it’s taken me to finish this recipe.

Dealing with darkness and artificial light in street photography

You would imagine that hard shadows in direct sunlight is the hardest contrast there is, but you would be…

--

--

Øyvind Nordhagen
Øyvind Nordhagen

Written by Øyvind Nordhagen

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