Palettes For Photography

My main point-and-shoot camera these days is a Sony ZV-1, which I’ve had since 2021. It is compact, easy to carry about, has a wonderful sharp and fast lens, but I have not been happy with the jpegs I’ve gotten out of the camera. Recently I used it to take a reference photo of a tree I had been sketching, but was quite dismayed that the skies in the photograph had turned cyan, even though the camera was on standard settings. I usually shoot jpeg plus raw, wanting to keep a raw file around in case I need its latitude for additional processing. Looking at the raw file, it was clear what happened in the jpeg in the camera: the image was not overexposed, but the blues were clipping when the sensor data were transformed into the jpeg. This got me to start researching ways to get better jpegs out of Sony cameras.

All of which lead me down the rabbithole of Sony film simulations. It turns out there’s a deeply-buried feature in the Sony interface called “picture profiles”. As designed by Sony, these are set up mainly to help videographers film in consistent low contrast for subsequent color grading in production. But they provide a quite powerful way to change the look of stills or video imagery. A photographer and cinematographer named Veres Deni Alex figured out that picture profiles provide a route to introduce film simulations into Sony cameras. Film simulations are a well-appreciated feature of Fujifilm digital cameras — the company drawing upon their long experience with analog film — but Sony cameras don’t have anything comparable. Alex put in the trial-and-error work to adjust the 25 or so parameters in a picture profile so as to get it to render like a particular film stock. Over the past several years he has built up a library of about 85 different film simulation profiles. I was intrigued and bought a copy of his recipe book.

The above straight-out-of-camera photo of a dog sculpture downtown in Davis on G Street is an example of the output of one of these profiles. The name of the profile is Classic Chrome, and Alex based it on the Fujifilm simulation of the same name. Fujifilm in turn designed their simulation to allude to documentary-style photos printed in magazines often shot with Kodachrome or Ektachrome. After one outing with it, I like the profile a good bit, and it seems well-suited for urban landscapes.

I would use a different profile if I were going on a photo walk through the local arboretum. I’d first look for one that is good at rendering greens and responds well to bright flower colors. (I’m not sure which one yet — I have lots of experimentation ahead of me). Essentially, loading profiles into one’s camera and working this way is akin to choosing a palette in plein air painting. The question to ask while setting out is what is the mood, sense of light, and story one is trying to capture in the photo outing? The choice of the photographic palette will vary accordingly.

It also seems important that this workflow emphasizes getting the look of the photo right in camera, rather than much later in post-processing. This again resembles sketching or painting in the field — the immediacy of the moment lets one emphasize the elements of light and form that are important in the scene. Otherwise one risks forgetting in the studio what the photo was about.