CineStill 400 – Evil repackages pretty decent film?

Before the photography mafia gets mad at me, the CineStill 400 was a gift.

For the uninitiated, CineStill bulk buys, chemically treats, and re-packages Kodak motion picture film and then sells it. It’s a complicated situation well beyond the scope of this post, but Kodak basically stopped selling this film to other re-spoolers, upsetting the film world and leading some to compare CineStill to Elon Musk (and not in a good way).

So there is a stigma, in certain circles, attached to continuing to use the film.

Like all hobbies, there are crazies at the extremes.

I like to think I’m not one of the crazies, just a “normie” who likes to shoot film.

As normie as someone who still shoots film can be, that is…

My family is even more clueless than me about film business etiquette and just went to a shop to buy me a gift I could shoot.

That didn’t involve gun powder.

(Though if you can develop film in coffee grinds, I bet you can develop it in gun powder too. Hmm…)

I digress.

My first experience with CineStill (bought by me before the Kodak controversy, or at least before I was aware of it) was underwhelming. It’s kinda famous for halation, which gives bright parts of the photo a sort of ethereal glow, but I didn’t get much of that and was disappointed in the results.

I would not have bought it again.

But this roll really surprised me. I may just have to risk the wrath of the photo mafia going forward.

These first shots were a revisit of an earlier set of pictures I took of an apple. People commented on it being “forbidden fruit” and the like, and I had an idea for a follow-up involving a hand desperately grasping for an out-of-reach apple.

This new effort involved my Pentax K-1000, my 100mm macro lens, a tripod, a mechanical timer, and a step stool.

First shot with counter at zero. I think these partial images are cool. f11, 1/60 sec

I was still trying to figure out how to handle my hand in the shot at this point. There are definite indications of halation. Yay? f11, 1/60 sec

I tried different things with my hand, different placements, motion blur, but once I saw them, I didn’t really like them. So here’s a close-up of just the apple, trying to capture the sheen. I did, but not as dramatically as in real life. f4, 1/1000 sec

The halation almost gives the apple an aura around the edges, or at the very least, a dropped-in-with-Photoshop-badly look. But it’s 100% real. I also wanted to capture part of the tree in the background, out of focus to add depth to the image. It’s…not something I’d put in my portfolio. If I had one. Which I don’t. f5.6, 1/500 sec

When I got this roll back from the lab, I was shocked. Some of the pictures were bright and vibrant and exceeded my previously set low expectations. These apple images aren’t the best ones, but they are the start of the roll.

Next time: other exciting things in my yard.