Recently my wife and I spent a night at the Jefferson Hotel located in Richmond, Virginia. The Jefferson is a 4-star luxury hotel established in 1895 with a completely renovated interior. Everybody at the Jefferson exuded professionalism from the valet, to the front desk, room service, and the on-site Lemaire Restaurant. The walls are decked with portraits of historical Virginians and the rotunda is beautifully designed. Naturally, I brought along some cameras to capture the surroundings.
Prior to this trip I purchased two rolls of CineStill 800 Tungsten balanced color negative film. I brought one roll loaded in my Pentax Spotmatic with 50mm Super Takumar lens, my Fuji X-T2, and my Fuji XF10. This post will be about the CineStill 800 images.
A few of the images above were taken of our dogs at home. The tungsten balance of the film gives the images a fairly strong green cast that, in my opinion, doesn’t make the film suitable for mid-daylight photos. The portrait of my wife near the hotel window is much more pleasing to my eye, and shows the strength of this film indoors under tungsten and mixed light, with lights in the background. The other indoor images from the hotel give an almost horror film vibe and illustrate the halation effect typical of CineStill images. The anti-halation layer of the film stock is removed to allow for normal processing which causes areas of intense light to give off the effect.
I still have one more roll to shoot, and I think I’ll be a bit more judicious with the scenes captured in this one. My thoughts are that this film stock will really shine in a blue hour/night time urban setting with street lights and signs making up the backdrop. My next roll will probably be shot capturing night scenes in Washington, D.C.