I have a feeling that if I had a radio alarm clock, it would have been playing Sunny and Cher this morning.
Out a bit early again, so not much light and a disappointing lack of murders.
That’s … oddly familiar.
The curse of a quiet, normal life, I guess.
It slowly grew brighter as the walk progressed, but still no crows.
I’ve touched on this before, but only in passing.
There are other birds present on these walks. While they are smaller and blend in better with the surroundings, making them difficult to photograph, they are quite vocal.
This morning was no different, and I enjoyed just listening to them.
Three crows showed up at the very end, not getting too close and not following me home.
The thieving bastards didn’t mind the distant crows and scampered about as if they owned the neighborhood.
Who knows? Maybe via a complex chain of shell companies and real estate investment firms, they do.
The flowers were unabashedly out in force, as if they owned the place.
And, as we always do on this channel, I celebrated my survival of the most recent walk with the morning coffee ritual.
I recently shot a roll of CineStill 800 on my Pentax K-1000 with 100mm macro lens.
I love the light leaks at the lead end of a roll…
But there was a bit of a mixup.
Woah Nelly!
I had a roll of CineStill 800, which I was saving for a night shoot, and a roll of CineStill 400, which is what I intended to shoot.
Carving your names into a corpse. There’s nothing more romantic!
So I shot it at ISO 400 instead of 800, and only figured it out about halfway through the roll, when I was digging around in my camera bag to grab some additional film and found the CineStill 400.
One small step for Man…
Oops.
But this is how I discovered that CineStill is a lie.
Two lies, actually.
(Not counting that they’re actually bulk-purchased Kodak cinema film modified for still photography, which technically makes them triple liars.)
A flash of brightness on a gray day
At the point I realized my mistake, there was nothing I could do.
I kept shooting the film at 400, and when I unloaded the roll, I marked it ‘400’ with a Sharpie.
Hello, you magnificant beast! Plus, halation!
When I dropped it off at the photo lab, I mentioned to the owner that I needed the processing pulled a stop because I’d used the wrong ISO setting.
“CineStill 800? We push that two steps when we develop it. We’ll just push it one step.”
Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?
Did you catch the lie? I sure did.
When developing CineStill 800, the lab treats it (presumably at CineStill’s instructions) as ISO 200 and pushes it two steps (that is, they develop it longer to compensate for the reduction in light that shooting at 800 results in).
That’s lie #1.
Gone but not forgotten. Ok, forgotten too.
Lie #2 is CineStill 400.
It’s actually ISO 200 film, so they push it one stop when developing, and oh yeah, that means it’s the exact same stock as CineStill 800!
You can’t take the sky from me
No doubt the experienced film photographers out there already knew this (and are thus complicit in the lie by not singing to the rooftops about it).
But I didn’t.
Urban guerrilla warfare. These weeds shall not defeat me!
As you can see, the pictures in question turned out just fine.
It’s complicated…
I still like the film, I just feel disrespected.
CineStill, I wish you’d felt comfortable enough to be open and honest with me from the start. I feel like I should have known going in that you like to play the ISO field.
Would I have never tried you had I known the truth?
Maybe.
Where’s a hero like Don Quixote when you need him?
But isn’t it worse for me to get together with you and then find out?
And feel betrayed?
You should have had the balls to tell me.
On the plus side, I guess I can do the night shoot with the CineStill 400 and just push it an extra stop.
ian m dudley 
