I bought my Rolleiflex K4B off eBay about a year ago and got a pretty sweet deal for it. Since then, it has become pretty much my favorite camera to shoot personal work with. Mine came with the Carl Zeiss Tessar 75mm f/3.5 lens, and the images it produces are just stunning.
Lately, I’ve been on a kick of pushing myself out of my comfort zone. For example, one of the things on my ever growing list, was shooting film at night with my Rolleiflex, and not using a tripod. I work in a studio, where I have total control of my light, so this exercise of shooting outdoors at night with film was going to be challenging and unusual for me.
I live in Los Angeles so I figured that Chinatown at dusk would be an excellent place to do this, so I loaded my Rolleiflex with Cinestill 800T and made my way.
I got there a little before the sunset, so I had enough time to load my camera and quickly explore my location. I had been there before, but I wanted to walk around to search for interesting, colorful, neon-y things to shoot. I was very excited to photograph all the colors, lanterns, neon lights, signs, people, everything!
For this experiment, I chose Cinestill 800T film because I wanted to achieve a cinematic look in my images. I rated this film at 1600 ISO so I could have a faster shutter speed. I shot most of this roll outdoors, but I also shoot a couple of frames indoors.
I process my own film at home. I developed my roll using Cinestill’s C41 kit and pushed it one stop. I then scanned the negatives on an Epson Perfection v800 scanner. I was so pleasantly surprised to see the results and I definitely want to shoot more of this stock at night.
~ Laura
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