CineStill 50d

To kick off this set of roll posts is the CineStill 50d I shot in Sydney all the way back in May. It’s mid August by the time I’m writing this, and early September at time of posting, so I’m very behind. Starting with this roll, I tried to drop the oks so we’ll see how that goes as I go through my feelings. Also, starting from this post, I’ll be downscaling the images on these roll posts. It’s a bit silly to have to load a 15+ MB image so these are scaled down and should be closer to 2-5 MB depending on the roll. One consequence of this is that the quality of these is significantly lower if you zoom in. I’m personally ok with that. At the end of the day this is more of a compromise I’m making because I’m being lazy about rewriting this site. In a perfect world, I’d set up a CDN and have variable resolution based on connection speed or image buffering. But again I’m being lazy about rewriting the site.

Anyways that’s the logistical stuff, let’s get to the pictures. Overall, I liked this roll. It’s got a really appealing color profile that’s a bit understated and maybe a bit yellower than I’d expect but in general is pretty nice. One thing I will say is that most of these pictures feel brighter than I expected. This may be because the film is ISO 50 and maybe I ended up metering them weirdly as a result. However, unlike the next roll, these were shot on my Minolta X-370 which has an in camera meter so the metering should’ve been consistent with other pictures I’ve taken with it. It’s not too big a deal and in most cases only ends up around about a half step to 1 step brighter than I’d expect or want.

In terms of the numbers, this is a pretty split roll. I took a total of 40 pictures on the roll and found I liked about half of them 21 small to 19 large. It’s a bit of an odd roll as I really leaned on vibe for a lot of these pictures instead of specific intentional choices. Honestly a lot of these pictures are pretty pedestrian but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Largely, I think the above really comes down to content in regards to what I wanted to shoot and what kinds of interactions they allowed. As is pretty obvious, this roll is pretty landscape oriented, with a lot of beach related pictures, a few park related pictures, some boat pictures, and a couple city pictures. Ultimately, there isn’t really much action being captured here so there isn’t a whole lot to do with the time aspect of photography represented. Additionally, most of these pictures aren’t really happening in areas where there’s a significant lighting difference so that’s also excluded. At the end of the day this collection of pictures is really very focused on composition and space. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not particularly similar to a lot of the pictures I’ve taken.

All that said, I do appreciate a lot of these pictures. The biggest chunk of these were taken during that Manley-Spit walk I talked about in a previous post. And I appreciate how calm this set of pictures is as a result. As a collection I do feel like it inhabits the space of what that walk felt like to me, peaceful and nature-y.

Honestly I don’t really have a whole lot else to say about this roll. The grain on a lot of these pictures is pretty tight but the actual focus is a bit all over the place. All told, it’s a relatively solid if uninspired bit of photography.