Cinestill 800 T experience

Remember that feeling when you shot your sweet roll of film, especially if it's a special one, bring it to the lab…get your mail with your sweet files…and see your banger images? Well, with this roll of Cinestill 800 T, my shots were more like a hit and miss and a light leaky mess, but an interesting one for sure. 

For everyone who doesn't know anything about film, or this particular film stock, a quick recap. Cinestill 800 T is a tungsten (since 800 T, for tungsten) balanced color negative film based on Kodak Vision 3 motion picture film. It is made especially for low light situations, suited for artificial light, and has a distinctive look to it, due to the halations around highlights (caused by the removal of the Remjet layer, so it can be processed in the C 41 way).

Not even is this a motion picture stock repacked and transformed into a still photography one, it is probably one of the most recognizable film stocks out there, so I had my hopes quite high, to say the least. I shot this roll for over 4 months, to not waste any of the precious frames. I got quite some interesting results, to say the least.

I shot these images with my Zenit E, and mostly a 28 mm Sun Actinon lens (never heard of this brand before either, I don’t blame you). I don't know the exact cause, but the images were just bombarded by light leaks on the top and bottom, which never happened to me before with this camera, but I suppose it could be due to the exchange of lenses on the camera while having the film loaded. Lesson learned. 

I also see some chemical marks on the frames, which might be some errors in the development process, I guess.

The mystery continues with the weird half frames, and morphed frames, which I honestly can't even explain, might be a winder error on my part, most likely. 

Some images are highly underexposed, which wouldn't be an issue if it would be the case with all the images on the roll. Still, due to the light meter of my camera going up to 500 asa/ISO only, it was always guesswork, balancing out with an according stop to compensate for those settings.

Altogether, I'm actually happy with these images, even though I know I made some mistakes with them. Since I still have one roll on my fridge, I will be happy to shoot it again, hoping for better results this time, with my errors in mind! 

I am really recommending this filmstock, especially if you can get it for a reasonable price! So learn from my mistakes, and take some great images!