Testing Cinestill 800T on the Nikon AF600

I am on a quest to find my favorite film stock. My gut feeling is that I will land on Cinestill 800T or Kodak Portra 400. I also have high hopes for Kodak Gold 200 but particularly in Medium format, not 35mm.

This first test is of course Cinestill 800T

Cinestill 800T is actually Kodak Vision3 500T film with the remjet layer removed. This is a very modern cinema film, with the T standing for a tungsten lighting balance, and around 14 stops of dynamic range. Recent notable movies include Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Babylon, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

These photos were shot on a Nikon AF600, which has a 35mm f3.5 lens. The film was developed at home, and scanned using a Fujifilm X-T5 and the Nikon 60mm AF-D Macro lens. Negatives were converted using Negative Lab Pro with basic color profile and the Portra preset. White balance was set to either auto-neutral, auto-mixed, or auto-warm depending on which looked best. No other color adjustments were done.

I was expecting the shots to come out darker than they did because the Nikon AF600 has extremely limited DX code reading, and cannot set the ISO manually. The camera reads the ISO of this film as 1000 instead of 800, and it’s usually recommended to meter the film at ISO 500. Because of this, the shadow rolloff is pretty steep, but it also means the highlights are a bit softer.

The grainy deep shadows and soft highlights have this nice painterly look to them, and is pretty far from the cinematic look this film was designed for.

One of the most interesting quirks of this film, is that it usually has red halation that shows up on bright highlights. This basically didn’t show up in my roll, likely from the general underexposing of the film.

Colors, especially skin tones, looked extremely nice in direct sunlight settings. The performance of this film has me wanting to shoot more, but I need to give other films a chance first.

There is one major downside to this film, and that is the overcast performance. Shooting under a more neutral light on cloudy days really destroys a lot of the characteristics that makes this film special. The colors are completely dull and the contrast is gone. Although some keepers are still possible.

Overall I love this film, and especially love it in direct sunlight situations. If shooting in any kind of neutral light, prepare for blue to take over your image. I also know results can vary widely depending on if you overexpose or underexpose this film. Unfortunately I could not test this with the camera I used, but I have seen examples, and I would encourage anyone interested in this film to do some research.