Starting OM Film Lab

In January 2026 I was packing for Hokkaido and I wanted one thing sorted before I left: a look to leave on the camera. Something I could set once and then not think about for two weeks, so that every frame came home speaking with the same voice and none of my evenings went to deciding what each photograph was supposed to be.

I went looking for it and it was not there. A few settings buried eight replies deep in a forum thread. Screenshots with no indication of what body they were shot on, or in what light. Nothing that felt like a collection somebody had actually curated and stood behind. Fujifilm shooters have shelves of this. Olympus shooters have fragments.

I shot the trip anyway. Then I came back and started building the thing I had gone looking for.

It started with a packing list

The first decision was about the question. Every recipe list I found was organised the way the camera menu is organised — by picture mode, by white balance shift, by numbers. That is not the question in your head when you are standing somewhere with the light going. The question is what the photograph should look like.

So OM Film Lab is driven by feeling rather than by settings. You say warm, or faded, or hard and contrasty, and it hands you something to put on the camera. The numbers are all there if you want them — every one of them, on every recipe — but you should not have to think in white balance shift to find a look you can already picture.

Why I stopped editing

My first camera was an Olympus E-PL2, bought secondhand in 2023 while I was at university. It is fifteen years old and it is still in the bag. For the first stretch I did what everyone does: shoot everything, bring it all home, and spend the evening in Lightroom deciding, one frame at a time, what each photograph was supposed to be. I made pictures I still like that way. I also lost a great many evenings.

Recipes changed that. Now I choose a look before I leave, put it on the camera, and let the whole trip come back in one voice. The photographs are finished the moment I take them. That sounds like a compromise and it is the exact opposite — it is more relaxing, and somehow more satisfying, to commit up front and then spend the day looking at what is actually in front of me instead of at a preview screen.

What OM Film Lab is

OM Film Lab is the phone app where all of this lives. It has the Creative Dial, which is the feeling-first way of finding a recipe rather than scrolling a list. It keeps a library, so the looks you actually use are one tap away when you are cold and standing in a street. And it keeps a record of your own journey with these cameras — what you shot, what you shot it with, what you had loaded at the time.

The site you are reading is the other half. Every recipe is published here in full: every setting, no sign-up, no paywall, no email. That does not change, and it is not a launch promise with an expiry date on it. If you never download the app, you can still shoot everything on this site. The app is for people who want the dial and the library in their pocket, and it is genuinely optional.

What this journal will cover

Four things, roughly in rotation.

• Recipes. Not the settings — those live on the recipe pages, and restating them in prose is how a number goes stale. What each one is chasing, what film it came from, how it behaves in light it was not built for, and when I would actually reach for it.
• Camera tips and tricks. The parts of these menus that change a photograph, as opposed to the parts that merely exist. Custom modes, the tone curve, the white balance shift, what the art filters are really doing, and the handful of settings that are four levels deep and worth the trip.
• How this gets built. The app and this site are made by one person. I will write about the decisions behind them, the things I got wrong first, and what it is actually like to ship software solo while travelling.
• How I shoot. Every recipe here has been outside. Each one starts from a real film stock, gets rebuilt using only controls the camera has, and then gets taken out on a real day before it appears on this site. If it does not hold together in real light, it does not get published. That process has cost me two lenses so far. I would rather that than a recipe I only ever saw on a screen.

Where this is going

On 20 August 2026 I am leaving on a long vagabonding season, funded by my savings, with no return date. The reason is narrow and specific: to build the most complete recipe collection Olympus and OM System shooters have. Different countries, different seasons, different light. The gaps in a collection only show up when you take it somewhere it has never been, and I would like to find all of them.

This journal is where the notes from that get written down. Thanks for reading — and for shooting an Olympus.