Cinestill 800T

 I was given a few rolls of film for Christmas by my most excellent friend Keith Sharples and amongst them was a roll of Cinestill 800T, a film I have not used before. This film has long been the favourite of Gas Station and Neon Sign photographers the world over and was designed to survive the harsh environment of Cine Cameras. I'm told this film is derived from Kodak Vision 3 500T and has the remjet layer removed.

Vision 3 is a great range of cinema film used, for example, by Disney to film the Star Wars franchise. Quentin Tarrantino is a big fan of it and was a proponent of the deal for Kodak to supply all the major film studios with film for the foreseeable future that arguably saved Kodak.

My camera of choice for this film was my Nikon F801s, a vertiable brick outhouse in terms of it's construction and very reliable. I also used my favourite walk about lens, AF Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 D. I was tempted to do night time photography, but I wanted to do something different than gas stations and neons. All I needed was a bright day....

Ye gods it was ages before I got my bright day which happened the day I was returning home from a visit to my daughter in that yorkshire. The short walk from her home to the train station passes through the local cemetery where there is a rather magnificent War Memorial for all the men from the town who went to war and never returned home. There's also a few War Graves there for men who managed to make it back but died of their injuries. I concentrated on the memorial as it has a bust on the top of a Soldier, it is a fitting display of respect and remembrance.

Once I caught my train home I didn't get to take any more photos for another three weeks because of the storms that swept the UK. February seemed to be one long shower of rain that is hard to describe without swearing. It persisted down! It wasn't until the final weekend that I was able to get out and I finished my roll of Cinestill at Wigan Pier whilst also shooting my HP5 for the Frugal Film Project. Apologies for any duplicates that may appear, but I did have a good afternoon.

As I mentioned last week, the Pier Quarter has undergone a refurbishment and it's looking very clean with the new paint and the repairs that desperately needed doing. For a century or more Wigan Pier was a thriving hub of local commerce with raw materials coming by barge from Liverpool and returning to Liverpool with all manner of finished cotton goods for export around the world.

To see it being neglected when it was in decline gave the impetus for the first refurbishment in the early 1980's when "The Way We Were - Museum of Wigan Life" and The Orwell pub was opened to much fanfare. Declining numbers in the early 2000's saw both closed and the future looked bleak until local Arts hub The Old Courts brought a consortium of financiers and developers together to give Wigan Pier another refurbishment.

This is now almost complete and it wont be long before the pub opens again with facilities for conferences, weddings and concerts. I really want to see how the inside looks and will report back here when I get that opportunity. The Museum is being transformed into a hub for local Artisans and Small Businesses to sell their goods from premises with affordable rent and where folks can go and browse and shop. There's also plans for a Gin Distillery too.

It's an exciting time down at Wigan Pier as the refurbishment nears completion. It would have been completed a year or more ago but our microscopic nemesis had other ideas. Wiganers are patient folk. We know it's going to be good and a nice pub lunch whilst watching the narrowboats go by on a sunny afternoon is well worth waiting for. 

On my way back home I popped into Wigan North Western Railway Station as there are some wonderful murals painted in the underpass depicting words and phrases in the local language, Wiganese. They give visitors to the town a helping hand when they strike up a conversation with Wigan folk. It's very welcoming too and much better than the plain walls we have been used to for the last few decades.

I developed my roll of Cinestill 800T in a Cinestill CS41 home developing kit. It would look it's best developed using ECN-2 chemistry, but as the remjet layer has been removed by Cinestill cross processing is easy and encouraged. I digitised it using my Ion Slides2PC 35mm scanner and I think it looks rather nice. Here's a few from my afternoon at Wigan Pier, the murals in the train station and a couple of the War Memorial in Bolton Upon Dearne. I have also put them and a few more in an album on Flickr that you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them

Cinestill 800T Nikon F801s