About this site

A seeing practice for people new to digital photography. It assumes you already understand the mechanical relationship between aperture, shutter and ISO, and starts from the harder question: deciding what the picture is going to be.

Why it does not start with gear

Exposure control is an afternoon's work — three numbers and one compensating relationship, and then you are done. What takes years is everything after: why moving the subject three centimetres left settles the whole frame, why an overcast day is kinder to a portrait than a bright one, why the same sky comes out grey for one photographer and black for another. No settings table answers those. You get there by looking at pictures, one at a time.

So every section here is a photograph plus a short piece of text telling you where to look. When you cannot see it, go back to the picture rather than reading on.

Where the photographs come from

All of them are public-domain or Creative Commons licensed, credited individually with photographer, year, licence and a link to the source page, collected on the credits page. That means the historic work shown here is genuinely free to use: Ansel Adams's 1927 Half Dome, Gustave Le Gray's 1850s seascapes and forest avenues, Julia Margaret Cameron's 1867 portraits, and the FSA documentary archive of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Modern work still in copyright — Cartier-Bresson, Fan Ho, Saul Leiter — is not reproduced here; where it is discussed, it is described in words and linked to the rights holder.

Beyond the licence check, every candidate photograph was inspected to confirm the chapter's point is actually visible in it. That pass rejected more than expected — among them a Kodachrome whose cyan dye had faded to brown monochrome, an image carrying a stock-agency watermark, and a Holocaust memorial that had been picked up as a "repeating pattern" example.

How accurate the film simulation lab is

The effects in the lab are an approximation computed in your browser. They are not Fujifilm's processing and use none of Fujifilm's colour profiles. The lab will tell you which way Classic Chrome moves yellows, or which part of the range DR400 protects; it will not match your camera's JPEG exactly. For accuracy, trust the camera.

Base images in the lab are restricted to public-domain, CC0 or plain CC BY photographs, because applying an effect creates a derivative work and a share-alike licence would attach its copyleft to whatever you export — which would not be fair to the reader.

Who made it

I am WLK, a Fujifilm X-T5 and X-E4 user; photography is a hobby. The writing and the code here were produced with Claude Code. For corrections, licensing questions, or to request that a photograph be taken down, write to tony85314@gmail.com.

Licence

Text on this site is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Photographs remain under their own licences, listed with their sources on the credits page — if you reuse one, follow its original terms rather than this site's.