Tokyo 4 - CineStill 800T

April 11st, 2025 -Dreamy coffee, light leaks, ND filter magic, vibrant tones at 1/125s, subway shots, street scenes, pedal boats, street food, CineStill didn’t disappoint.

Here comes the first 800T. My resources were scarce, I was saving this film stock for the days where I would start to adjust my jetlag, when I could stand up to after 6pm awake.

We started the day going to a super fancy coffee shop called TABI TO COFFEE Asakusa | タビトコーヒー, where I could have an incredible coffee Omakasé made of 3 beans of my choice. My favorite was the Colombian one, which seemed to come from a dream.

You can tell by the amout of coffee in each cup, that my favorite was the one on the left. Look at that color!

I like everything on the CineStill films. Since they are a respool, I can see light leaks getting over the sprockets (the little holes the camera use to advance the film) on some magical magenta tones. This happens both on the 400D and the 800T, and it’s an absolute charm.

Again, I was very happy on choosing CineStill for most of my rolls. Afraid of x-ray machines at the airport (especially in the US, in Japan’s domestic flights I knew it wouldn’t be an issue), I just had brought 6 rolls of it, I decided to buy it there, and my friend Kimi helped me securing 10 rolls of 800T and 5 rolls of 400D. I was packed and loaded.

This roll was shot during the afternoon. I was afraid on how this Tungsten film stock would perform during the afternoon, where I still had abundance of light, I thought I would have cold and ugly colors, especially because the day wasn’t very sunny.

Luckily that didn’t happen, and I didn’t need to put a yellow filter in front of the lens (well, if I had to, now would be too late to discover).

I think the ND filter losing 2 stops helped. I believe there’s something related to the amount of time you keep the shutter open and color balance, for some reason, shutter speeds between 1/60sec and 1/250sec seem to produce more vibrant colors. I know, I know… Everything is just light passing through, but I don’t know, every time I take a 1/1000sec shot, the colors are just meh. The good stuff is in the 1/125sec, 1/250sec, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We took the subway again, and of course, BAM! BLADE RUNNER MACHINE.

We emerged from the underground, and I found a very beautiful scene, of a guy helping a woman with her bike, some wash&drier machines, and a guy on his suit, and a very pitoresque Italian car parked in a garage close to a street.

Japan is fucking fantastic.

Time to go to our next destination: Shinobazu Pond Benten Daikokutendō (不忍池辨天大黒天堂). A beautiful park with a lake where you could rent these ducks and pedal. My son loved it, because he was on the steering wheel while mom and I were pedalling.

See? The colors aren’t that cold…

Then, I took pictures of people selling street food. They are always receptive to photography, it’s so beautiful to see that it even makes me emotional just on writing about it.

One thng to notice is that this is the 37th exposure! Gotta explore the rolls until the end, gotta make that lemonade from that lemon! Can’t waste film!

Our day continued, I lodaded another 400D, but that’s a topic for the next post (which is HOT!)