Tokyo 7 - CineStill 400D

April 12nd, 2025 - Almost 100% keeper roll: CineStill magic, Shinjuku Gyoen beauty, family shots, gas station math, cab portraits, and legendary Benitsuru pancakes,ended with an 800T reload for Tokyo.

Warning: This roll has an almost 100% awesome photos!

Alright! Another day in Tokyo! Another opportunity to capture remarkable stuff! You are going to see lots of CineStill 400D/800T here because it’s the main film I used for this trip, intentionally, because I love the halation effect. This is how the loot look like…

I took that in the hotel room just after loading the film. As I wrote before, I am using an App to log the stills and have EXIF data on them after scanning. In this App, I usually take the first shots as reference, so I know when the roll starts, in terms of metadata, for example: this shot was taken at 8:39 AM, at this precise GPS location.

Over the hotel’s desk, you can see the tools of a film photographer. Film canisters, air pump, filter bags, blanket, cleaning cloth, and a rope strap (more on the left side).

If you’re curious, this is the App I use, I promise I’ll log a post about it as soon as the Japan picture dump series is over.

Some screenshots of the phone film logging app to keep things super organized.

As the roll notes suggest, we are heading to the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden Park (新宿御苑), where the following scenes were waiting for me.

After capturing that exuberance of colors, water, and nature, we proceeded into the park, and I took some photos of interesting people doing interesting things.

This photo look like it was taken with a digital infrared camera, but obviously it was not. The trees are indeed that color.

Then, some family shots, for the register.

When we left the park, I saw this gas station. I love taking gas station photos for many reasons, one of them being the price of gas. Let’s do math.

I assume the ¥182 is the regular gas. As the day of the photo, ¥182 is $1.25 (USD), and that price is for the Liter. Now, comparing prices with the US. 1 Gallon equals 3.78 liter, so we just need to multiply that. 182*3.78=¥688, and that equals $4.72. In New Jersey, the gallon is around $3.00. So in Tokyo, the gas costs 157% than what it would cost in New Jersey. Gas in Japan is VERY expensive, like more expensive than Brazil.

Useless math for a photography blog post, but anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Alright, time to move on in our day with some motorcycles, a woman resting on a bench, a family mirror selfie, and the coolest phone boy!

It’s time for Pancakes! We got in a cab to our next destination! The taxi driver was SO cool, I took two photos inside the cab, and he posed for one.

We finally got to the famous and busy Benitsuru Pancake (紅鶴). This place is so packed, that you need a same-day reservation, they have extremely limited seats (it’s one of these Instagrammable attractions). My wife went there at 6AM (when she was running her daily 5K) and made this reservation for us for noon, they make the pancakes on extremely limited batches, with the most premium ingredients any American could ever dream about.

Time to change film! I couldn’t miss these pancakes on film, so I loaded an 800T (a.k.a. Tokyo 9, next post), and took the following. These photos are from the next post, which I am spoiling here just for continuity.

My wife got a sweet one. If you know the quality of the strawberries in Japan alone, you can tell that this fresh made pancake is something that came from Gods’s hands.

The God…

Alright! Time to finish these pancakes and proceed to Tokyo 9, see you on the next post!