Tokyo 3 - CineStill 400D

April 11st, 2025 - CineStill-inspired night shots, subway reflections, visit to Sensō-ji, and GPS-logged film metadata. Still early in the journey.

My idea with photographing Tokyo on film actually got heavily inspired by the CineStill look and its night shots, neon lights, and the halation effect. Tokyo 3 came on the third day of the trip, where I was still picturing using 1 film roll per day.

Something that got me very impressed is Japan’s subway cleanliness. The floor, walls, and ceiling is cleaned, and because of that, any sort of screen nearby greatly reflects everywhere.

Note the reflection over the ceiling, that’s due to cleanliness.

My plan was to use the 400D during the day, and the 800T during the night. Film is not convenient as digital, and I think I was able to do a manageable work on this by getting an ND filter that kills 2 stops, just in case I had loaded an 800T during the day, the trick worked!

An advantage of that ND filter is that I would also use slower shutter speeds, like 1/60sec, this added some movement to my stills, and I could rely more on the 800T without having to use the 1/1000 sec s.s.

I took lots of photos inside the subway, the people, the cleanliness, and Tokyo subway in general is a very rich subject for photography.

In this day, we visited Sensō-ji Five-Storied Pagoda, a tourist attraction. For all these photos, I am using a mobile App to store metadata. I plan writing a detailed post about it later on, so that’s how I know. For each analog photo, I have EXIF data such as lens, camera, aperture, s.s., ISO, film stock, timestamp, and GPS position (from the phone).

After that, I took some more shots, and we came back to the hotel.

Buckle up! We are just at the beginning of this journey, with street photography as its finest!