Ditch the cables: Meet the first app that sends recipes to Fuji cameras

Hi Max! Would you like to start by introducing yourself to our readers?
I build software for a living. I’ve been in tech my entire career.

But I’ve been a photographer longer than I’ve been anything else. As a child I spent my summers running through the woods in the Pacific Northwest, taking pictures with disposable cameras and filming my adventures with my friends on a VHS camcorder we borrowed (without asking) from my friend’s dad.

Even then, I knew something that seems to escape people to this day. A photograph is a door back. Not to a place, to a moment. It’s the light the way it fell that evening, the people standing in it, the thing I felt and could never have said out loud. Time takes all of it. The photograph is what it leaves behind.

I take thousands of pictures that never go online, and I’m at peace with that. A photograph doesn’t need an audience to matter. It needs to survive, and it needs to look the way the moment felt. A powerful photo isn’t meant to rot in an endless feed where it does neither.

I am the founder of The Forge, a small studio that makes tools for photographers, filmmakers, and other creative types. Most of us spent our careers in tech building things we would never use. Now we only build what we love, because we love it.

As a photographer, did you feel that the potential of the Fuji X System was not being fully explored?
Fujifilm makes cameras with a soul. The film simulations are the proof: decades of film science living inside a body you can carry in your pocket.

And then the camera hands you seven custom slots and a menu you fill one setting at a time, standing in the street while the light slips away from you and the moment is gone.

The potential was always there. The access wasn’t. Like a caged lion, waiting to be unleashed.

I never wanted a different camera. I wanted to reach everything mine could already do.

How did the idea for the Huginn app come about, and how does it differ from Fujifilm’s official app and other apps available on the market?
It started after a wilderness camping trip with friends. I came home with a stack of SD cards and thousands of frames, and on the plane back home, my mind would not stop.

I wished I’d carried a different recipe for a sunset mountain peak shot I’ll never stand in front of again. But I’d filled my seven slots before I left camp.

I knew I faced hours, maybe days, of sorting before I’d see a single frame the way I saw it when I fired the shutter.

I knew I’d keep only a fraction. I hold an incredibly high standard, and I cull in rounds until only the frames that matter remain.

And then the hardest question:

“How do I share them with the people who were there, without throwing my life onto a feed?”

I’m an incredibly private person by nature. I wanted albums I control, shared my way, with the people I choose.

Four problems. So I built the tools that solved those problems for me. Huginn is the first of three: the look, before the shot. Valkyrie, coming to the Mac, automatically imports the cards, sorts the photos and handles the culling. Muninn keeps the finished work and shares it on your terms.

Fujifilm’s own app connects the camera and moves your files, and it does that well. Huginn is built around something else: the look itself. The magic of the moment.

I found some apps that allowed you to write looks over USB. That was a good start. I also found lots of claims that wireless push was “impossible” to do. Anyone who knows me also knows that when something is declared “impossible” is exactly when I get obsessed. Huginn was the first app to send a custom recipe to a Fujifilm camera without a cable. The camera can stay switched off in your bag and still take the recipe. With Pro, all seven slots are written in a single pass, so you can carry a different set of looks for every kind of day.

It can render one of your own RAW files through a recipe, or through your whole library, on the camera itself. You choose a look from your own frame, not from someone else’s sample.

And it plans the shoot around the light. The library, the camera and the day live in one place, built to be fast when the light is moving.

In addition to the existing recipe library, can users add their own recipes? If so, how does this work?
Yes.

Build one from scratch and tune it until it’s yours. Bring one in from a JPEG you’ve already shot, and Huginn reads the look straight out of the file. Or scan a recipe written on a page or saved in a screenshot.

Then choose. Keep it to yourself, on your camera and in sync across your own devices. Or give it to the community.

A contributed recipe is reviewed, then published under your name, on your own creator page that points back to your work. If you’d rather stay unnamed, you can contribute anonymously.

We never take. Every recipe in the library names the photographer who made it. Our sourcing rules are public at huginnfilm.app/library-standards, and if a creator can prove that their work was used without their consent, it comes down.

Do you expect the recipe library to grow over time? Who can submit new recipes?
It grows because of the people who shoot. The community of Fuji photographers. That is the point of it.

Huginn is a celebration of the Fujifilm community. Danny Pestka, Piotr Skrzypek, Kevin Mullins, and every photographer who has handed us a look they love. Danny has figured out how to manipulate sunlight like a sorcerer conjuring fire. It’s absolute magic. Kevin’s monochrome recipes speak to my soul. They don’t need color to pull you into the moment. Newlyweds’ first kiss or family dinner around the table, I feel like I was there. Like it was my own memory. And Piotr reminds me to see the beauty all around me every day. At home, in the streets, in the woods. Awe is all around us if you look hard enough, and Piotr reminds me of that every time I shoot with one of his recipes. It has been such a pleasure and an honor to work with three photographers I respect so much. The library is theirs as much as ours.

Anyone can submit. Make a recipe in the app, send it from its page, and it’s reviewed before it goes in. New looks arrive regularly, and Pro members see each new drop first.

I’d rather the library be built by a thousand photographers than by us.

How much does the app subscription cost, and what do Free users miss out on compared with Pro users?
We wanted Free to be a real product, not a demo with the best parts torn out.

Free gives you the whole library, unlimited saves, unlimited recipes of your own, a recipe pushed to any of the seven slots over USB-C as often as you like, a render of your own frame on your own camera, one Film Palette, a camera backup and restore, the wireless remote shutter, today’s light where you stand, and everything synced through iCloud. You could use Huginn for years without paying, and it would still earn its place on your phone.

Pro is for shooting without the cable and putting your whole library to work at once: wireless push, backup and slot reading, a full palette written to the camera in one pass, full remote control with self-timer, intervalometer and a look switcher, Virtual Bracketing across your library, full-resolution renders, unlimited palettes and backups, shoot planning for any date and any place, and early access to new looks.

Pro is $19.99 a year or $3.99 a month at founder pricing, until October 31. After that it becomes $29.99 a year and $4.99 a month, and anyone who subscribes before then keeps the founder rate for as long as they stay.

When we looked at what others in this space charge, we were surprised. We set out to be reasonable. But servers, storage and the infrastructure behind hosting and sync cost real money, and Pro is where that cost lives.

We understand that Huginn is much more than just a tool for loading and managing recipes, is that correct? What else can users find in the app?
Correct. Huginn is the Swiss Army knife for shoot day.

Before: plan the shoot around the light. Golden hour, blue hour, the weather, alerts when the light turns, a shot list and a gear list, and a countdown on your Lock Screen. Load seven looks onto the camera before you walk out the door.

During: a remote in your pocket. Fire the shutter, run a self-timer or an intervalometer, switch the whole look on the camera from your phone.

After: render a frame through your recipes on the camera itself and choose the look that tells the truth about the moment. Back up every custom setting on the camera and put it all back when you’re done experimenting. Share a recipe as a card with a QR code that opens it in Huginn.

On a small shoot, Huginn is the whole kit in your pocket. For the big jobs it’s the front door to the rest of The Forge, built so the look you chose before the shot travels with the frame all the way from the camera to the archive.

That’s just the start. We have a massive new update coming in the next couple of weeks that we think photographers will love. You’ll also start to see how Huginn, Valkyrie, and Muninn work together. It’s one thing to hear me talk about it, but once you see a full workflow through the suite you’ll see how powerful that connection really is.

Is there anything you’d like to leave to our readers?
Most of what we see is gone the moment we see it. Light moves. People leave. The evening ends.

A photograph is how you immortalize that moment forever. The hard part is capturing what your mind sees.Huginn is there to help translate how you experience the shot in your mind into a finished frame. And it does it FAST so you never miss the moment fighting menus on the camera.

Danny Pestka: instagram.com/dannys.frames and huginnfilm.app/c/dannys.frames

Kevin Mullins: www.kevinmullinsphotography.co.uk and huginnfilm.app/c/kevinmullins

Piotr Skrzypek: piotrecipes.wordpress.com and huginnfilm.app/c/piotrskrzypek