A Quebec recipe under the sun of Terengganu

The sea and a beach in Malaysia. (Film recipe CW - Victor Séguin)

When CW – Victor Séguin travels without me

I would not have recommended CW – Victor Séguin for a beach at midday under a tropical sun.

That's not a doubt about the recipe. It's simply that I designed it for something else: soft window light, overcast skies, golden hour, and human faces in diffused natural light. It's a recipe of restraint: highlights pulled down, colour desaturated, and clarity softened. PRO Neg Std as a base. The opposite of what you'd expect to face on a beach along the South China Sea in the middle of the day.

Nizam Sutimin taught me otherwise.

A post, a surprise

Nizam is a member of the Facebook group Film Recipes for Fujifilm Cameras, the same group where I had published all seven CW recipes before lucelenta.art even existed. That's where he discovered them. When he shared his photos taken in Terengganu using the recipe, he credited me as the author.

The first thing I noticed when I saw these images was that it held.

In the first photo of a woman seen from behind facing the sea, the white sand renders without burning out, the hazy sky keeps its softness, and the water — that clear turquoise you don't see at our latitudes — is there, understated, unamplified, and honest. The highlights don't collapse. The scene breathes. The second photo shows a ginger cat on the sand and confirms the same thing: short, hard midday shadows, unforgiving vertical light, and yet the recipe absorbs all of it without breaking down.

I looked at these two images for a long time.

Ginger cats everywhere. (Film recipe CW - Victor Séguin)

What this reveals

CW – Victor Séguin was developed from a French film, Les enfants vont bien, for its interior light and quiet warmth. The intention was documentary and intimate. What Nizam did was ask it to work in conditions it was never meant for, and the recipe responded with a consistency I hadn't planned.

What probably explains this behaviour is precisely what I had wanted to avoid in other recipes: highlights set to –2 create real headroom against overexposure. Colour at –2 prevents colours from going harsh under strong light. The recipe isn't trying to enhance. It's trying to hold back. And that disposition toward restraint works just as well in generous light as it does in soft light.

I wouldn't have predicted that. Nizam showed me.

The same recipe, two kinds of light

To better grasp the distance, here are two photos taken at home in Quebec with the same recipe.

The first shows a gardener at work, photographed in the late-day light of southern Quebec. Purple irises in the foreground, deep greens in the lawn, and the softness of golden-hour light: this is exactly the territory CW – Victor Séguin was designed for. The recipe is fully at home here.

The second is Beth, my cat, photographed from outside through a window. The light is filtered interior light, muted and indirect. The ginger and grey fur renders with precision, the warm tones present without spilling over. A transitional light — neither fully indoors nor fully outdoors — and the recipe settles into it naturally.

Placing these two images alongside the ones from Terengganu says something that words struggle to capture. The same recipe, the same restraint, and atmospheres that have almost nothing in common. It isn't the recipe that changes from one place to another. It's the light speaking to it differently.

A gardener in the afternoon light. (Film recipe CW - Victor Séguin)

A ginger cat, in passing

When I saw Nizam's ginger cat on the sand in Terengganu, I knew which second photo to choose for this post.

Beth, my ginger cat, already appears elsewhere on this site. And among the travel photos, there's a ginger cat I came across in San Bartolomeo in Galdo, in Campania. Three radically different kinds of light — tropical Malaysia, Quebec, and autumnal Campania — and in each case a ginger cat somewhere in the frame.

I don't know what to make of it, except that it delights me.

Ginger cats everywhere, I tell you! (Film recipe CW - Victor Séguin)

What this opens

These recipes were developed here, in conditions I know and can control. But they travel. They arrive in light I haven't yet encountered, in the hands of photographers I don't know, and they do things I hadn't anticipated.

I'm curious to know what they look like elsewhere. If you've used a CW recipe in a light or a place I wouldn't have imagined, I would genuinely be happy to see it.

The full settings for CW – Victor Séguin are available here.

— Louis-Martin

Photos : Nizam Sutimin — Terengganu, Malaysia — Fujifilm X-T30 III and a Sigma 18-50mm zoom lense