It seems that everywhere I turn lately, I stumble upon some random abandoned gas station, cafe, or building. Living in a more rural area certainly aids in this discovery, but I had no idea this one existed until we stumbled upon it while driving to the store. The colors were immediately striking – vibrant yellows with hints of red and blue, and green “grass” just beginning to emerge. It made for an interesting pit stop with the camera.
Shooting SOOC JPGs
One of the photographic changes I’ve made this year is moving away from processing RAW images to using SOOC (straight out of camera) JPG files. Mentally, this shift has been significant when it comes to taking photos. It takes me back to my film days when you had to get it right “in-camera” and not depend on post-processing edits afterward. My first transition from film to RAW was back in mid-2002 when I switched from the Nikon N70 to the Nikon D100. Here’s one of those first RAW images:
These RAW files hold up pretty well over time, considering they were shot on a camera with a sensor far inferior to that of a smartphone today. Back then, you could only shoot RAW or JPG, but not both, and basically, the JPG files looked pretty bad. The RAW files were super dull, flat images that were good for post-processing, but it takes a ton of time to process RAW files correctly, even today in 2024.
So the options today are to do what we used to do with film: get it right in the camera and just use those images straight out of camera (SOOC). Fujifilm has been waving this flag for years, and I spent 2016 trying to do something like that, but I didn’t take the time to try to perfect it. Fast forward 8 years, and everyone has a bit of screen fatigue, so it’s been nice to go back to basics.
Rural Cafe SOOC JPGs
In case someone comes along months or years later, the images below were shot with the Fujifilm Astia film simulation on the X-T5. I like all the different film stocks. Astia has punchy yet soft colors that lean a little green, teal, turquoise-ish, which I love. Some people hate the green tinge in film, but I happen to really like it. The café was directly across the street from this gas station, and the church and wildflowers at the bottom were on the side of the road on the way. In keeping with the idea of SOOC JPGs, the images below are unedited, straight out of the camera. They only received a slight crop here and there, but I didn’t have to post-process the images at all, which was awesome.
