Night photography with Cinestill 800T
I’ve been wanting to shoot Cinestill 800t for a long time, especially at night. And some weeks ago I finally had the chance to shoot a roll of the dreamy, tungsten balanced film. With all of its halations.
Shooting analog is always exciting in terms of the result. So many things can go wrong (or right) - especially for me for some reason. Exposure fails, light leaks, rewinding troubles and much more. Add night photography to the mix and you’ll have the perfect storm. Especially when it’s the first time ever shooting at night.
I really recommend trying this out. It’s not as difficult as it might feel, and exploring the city at night gives a lot of new inspiration. All you really need is:
a film camera (preferably one with Bulp-feature to control the long exposure times)
a tripod
a cable release (to prevent camera shakes)
and of course a color film stock of your own choosing.
I recommend trying out Cinestill 800t because of its iconic colors and halations, but you could try out a Portra 400/800 if you want a more natural look. Try watching Brae Hunziker og Willem Verbeeck for inspiration.
Understanding Reciprocity Failure
One thing I’ve really been struggling with understanding is the concept of reciprocity failure when shooting long exposures at night with color films. In short, reciprocity failure is when your film is getting less sensitive of the light and colors during the exposure and it should be compensated for when making exposures longer than 1 second.
There is a more correct scientific way of describing it for sure, but I’m not a big science guy so all I need to know is: I need to adjust my exposure!
The most important take away is that you’ll have to take this loss of sensitivity into consideration when shooting in low light situation and add to the total length of the exposure in order to get the results you want.
To make it all more exciting every film stock has its own needs in terms of compensating for the exposure time. It’s called the P-number. Some film stocks, like Ilford HP 5+, have a data sheet available where you can see the P-number and use it to calculate the correct exposure time, but some film stocks don’t. Like the Cinestill 800t (sigh!).
I’ve watched countless YouTube videos about the topic, and something that seems to be useful when roaming the streets with a roll of Cinestill is to adjust your light metering with a factor of 1.3 by using the “Xʸ” button on your calculator.
As an example, if your light meter says 2 seconds of exposure, grab your calculator and punch in 2 as X and 1,3 as Y giving you a new exposure time of 2,5 (ish) seconds.
Tip: the “Xʸ” button can be found on most smart phone calculators when used in landscape mode.
According to CInestill’s own explanation of shooting Cinestill 800t at night they say:
“As with all color negative film, it’s usually best to err on the side of giving the film more exposure to create a denser negative with more information for color correcting when scanning or printing in the darkroom.“
Here are some more examples:
The iconic red halation around light sources is a result of the missing remjet layer. Cinestill films are not just repackaged motion picture films, but in the production process of these films the remjet layer is removed (at least as I understand it) and that is giving the pictures these halations that Cinestill film stocks are known for.
Not really sure what happened to the following two shots. Somehow they merged. Maybe it’s because they were the two last shots of the roll if I recall correctly. Anyways, I actually really like the result.
And now, for the final photography, a good ol’ analog cliché: a gas station at night. Stay tuned for more. Currently shooting Cinestill 400D in my Nikon FE 2 and Cinestill 50D in my Yashica Mat 124G.
