1000+ examples · 12 shot types · 20 deep breakdowns · every recipe
Steal these shots — and here's exactly how to take each one
A thousand real photographs pulled from 40+ photography subreddits, sorted into shot types, each with the full X100VI recipe. Then 20 techniques broken down frame by frame — what's happening, why it works, and how to do it yourself. Tap any photo for the full-resolution original and a link to the photographer.
🎯 The one recipe that works everywhere
If you set nothing else, set this. It will not embarrass you in any situation, and every recipe below is a variation on it.
Don't know where these live on the camera? → 🎛️ Where every setting actually lives — each row mapped to the exact dial, button or menu path.
🖼️ Browse the library
Pick a shot type — the recipe updates. Tap any photo for full resolution and the original post.
🔬 Twenty techniques, broken down
One real photo set, dissected. Each frame here is a technique you can apply anywhere — nothing about these depends on the location they happened to be shot in.
These twenty come from a single summer sailing set posted to r/fujifilm by u/Grouchy-Praline-9508 (Fujifilm X-T4 + 33/56/70-300mm). Using one photographer's set means you can see how a consistent look holds across twenty different situations — which is the real lesson.
🎨 The look that ties them together
Warm gold skin and stone against cyan water, lifted blacks, muted sky, speculars allowed to blow. Build it as a custom bank (C1) and it works for any bright, warm, outdoor shooting — beach, desert, city summer, poolside.
Shadow −2 creates the lifted hazy blacks. Clarity −2 gives the soft bloom. Color Chrome FX Blue Strong deepens water and sky without touching skin. Swap Classic Chrome → Reala Ace for warmer, gentler skin.
⚠️ Gear reality — what a fixed 35mm can and can't copy
That set used 33/56/70-300mm on APS-C = 50/85/105-450mm equivalent. Your X100VI is a fixed 23mm f/2 = 35mm equivalent, with digital teleconverter crops at 50mm and 70mm.
| Shot type | X100VI? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| POV / self-in-frame | Better, actually | 35mm is the ideal POV focal length. Your bread and butter. |
| Environmental wides | Yes | Native 35mm handles these directly. |
| Still life / detail | Yes | Get closer — focuses to ~10 cm. |
| Portraits | Mostly | 50mm digital TC, step back to ~6 ft. |
| Compressed telephoto | No | Can't fake 450mm. Get closer, or make the foreground the subject. |
Your unfair advantage: a built-in 4-stop ND and a leaf shutter. You can shoot f/2 in blazing noon sun, and sync flash at any shutter speed for fill against a bright sky. Most cameras can do neither.
🧠 Building a set — what separates a body of work from a camera roll
The single most transferable lesson, and it has nothing to do with settings.
✅ Do this
- One grade across everything. Pick a recipe and commit for the whole trip. This is the biggest reason a set reads as intentional rather than accidental.
- Put yourself in the frame. Feet, legs, a hand, a shoulder. It converts a view into a memory — and it's all native 35mm.
- Shoot the evidence, not just the event. The strongest photo in that set has no people in it: two swimsuits drying on a line.
- Include one frame in a different mood. A single blue-hour shot resets the viewer's eye and makes everything around it land harder.
- Vary your distance. Wide, medium, tight detail. A set shot entirely at one distance has no rhythm.
⚠️ Avoid this
- Repeating one device. That set has four "back of someone's head" frames. By the fourth it reads as a crutch. One per set.
- Five versions of the same beat. Five people-on-floats shots. Keep the best, cut the rest.
- Posting too many. A viewer's impression tracks the average image, not the peak. Twenty good photos land softer than ten great ones.
- No sense of place. Strip the two bell towers out of that set and it could be Greece, Mexico or Thailand. Shoot what makes a place itself.
- No faces. Two real faces in twenty frames keeps the viewer at arm's length. Emotion is what makes a stranger care.
- The clichés. Bottles clinked into the sun, a hand reaching at the sunset — satisfying to take, forgettable to look at. Take them, don't build around them.
How to actually use this page
- Pick one shot type per outing. Trying all twelve in a day means you get good at none.
- Load the recipe into a custom bank before you leave — see C1–C7 banks.
- Copy the composition, not the subject. The angle and the light transfer anywhere; the specific street doesn't.
- Tap through to the original posts — photographers on these subs routinely list exact settings in the comments.
Credit & sourcing. Every photograph belongs to its photographer. The browser shows reduced-size thumbnails for study; the lightbox loads the full-resolution original from Reddit and every photo links back to its original post. Nothing here is presented as my work.