This is a small follow-up to my former post : A NIGHT TRIP TO SENOKO FISHERY PORT .
These pictures were shot on Cinestill 800T with a Leica M6 with Summicron 35 Asph v2 or 50mm V5. Processed at the lab around the corner and scanned at home with the Epson v800.
I shot the roll at 640 ISO, still I found the pictures being under exposed, unlike the roll I shot in Tokyo last year.
I shot the last of my Cinestill 800T 35mm rolls during the last holidays in Japan. This is the last roll from the batch I ordered from UK a few years back when it was first released. I must say that I am quite satisfied with this one.
The roll was kept a couple of years in the fridge but had also traveled by plane in many occasions, because it is not so easy to make up your mind to shoot a 18$ roll of film rates at 800 Iso and specified for Tungsten light.
The roll was shot with a Leica M6 camera and one my Summicron lenses, 35, 28 or 50mm.
Based on my former experiences I rated the film at 640 ISO on the M6 ISO dial and off we go lets shoot happily.
The first few shots are taken at night in the popular area of Dotombori in Osaka. Neon lights, restaurants and people, that works great for the 800T.
When shooting at night the M6 meter, which does center averaged measure, will have a tendency to overexpose : your subject is bright surrounded by a lot of darkness, so the reading will tend to overexpose. I generally underexposed by a step of diaphragm or the next speed to get the balance right.
On the next day we were off to Nara to visit its park and temples and the 800T was still not finished. The following shots were done without filter.
The above shot has tints that reminds of Portra 400, so it is not that bad. I tried to shot as open as possible which explains the softness. The M6 speed is limited to 1/1000 second so shooting in daylight with a 640 ISO film does not always give you a lot of latitude in term of aperture.
But shots taken in the shade allows a wider aperture and to play with out of focus.
The next few shots are taken in restaurant in Takamatsu the main city in Kagawa prefecture.
The south most part of our trip was Hiroshima where we visited the peace memorial.
At this point I played it old school and rewind the film which was about 28 shots and store it aside. I loaded a roll of Rollei CR200 slide film and when back in Osaka, I loaded the Cinetsill back again, put the cap, turn the aperture rint to on F22, set the speed to 1/1000 and fires 29 shots to find more or less the point where I was last and use my last 8 frames below:
Cinestill produces a tungsten film (the 800T) based on motion picture cinema film; they pre-process and package the film so it can be used in 35mm cameras and processed in any C41 capable lab. Cinestill also had a daylight film and planed to offer a 120 format film, but if I believe their web site (http://cinestillfilm.com/) all products are sold out at the moment and the kick-starter project for the 120 format did not get off the ground.
You can however still buy some film in some online re-sellers or in brick and mortar shops. I have 5 in my house in France waiting for me that I ordered from Firstcall Photographic Ltd in the UK and I bought this one in the Lomo shop in Chinatown in Singapore. This is quite a costly film, Lomo sold it around 16 SGD and Firstcall 13 (so around 8 EUR or 10 USD). Processing is standard price so around 8 SGD here. All in all this is quite expensive for casual shooting.
Picking the camera to try a new or special film is a bit tricky, I do not want to blame the gear for missing shots or bad exposure, so I decided to remove the dust from the F4s. Unfortunately it appeared (once all loaded) that the auto-focus was not working any more. Well we have a say in France that for every bad thing there is a good one coming. So with no AF working I was allowed to pick up a manual lens; that was the small and sturdy 50mm F1.4 AIS. But I must admit it feels silly to carry such a big beast of a camera with no AF.
After google-ing a bit I decided to overexpose the film a bit and shot it at 640 ISO and processed at 800. This is a Tungsten film, for those who do not know it is to be shot in scenes lightened by tungsten bulbs. Daylight shots should be done with a 85B color filter; I have done none of this and tried to manage the white balance in Lightroom, but I think I’ll get the proper filter next time (quite inexpensive).
Camera:Nikon F4s
Lens:Nikkor 50mmF1.4 AIS
Film:Cinestill 800T
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