I had the pleasure of shooting with Cinestill the last few months. Just a couple rolls of the Cinestill 50 and one roll of the 800. There are 3 rolls of CineStill BWXX black and white film patiently waiting for me in the refrigerator, excited to try those.

I won’t get technical about the film, you can find that information on the Cinestill website. They explain how their film work much better than I can. Plus, this post isn’t a review about Cinestill, just my experience. 

My first roll was with Cinestill 50, which I shot at box speed, but the 50 can be rated at ISO 12-100 according to the folks at Cinestill. I think I’ll have to give that a try on my next roll.

Here are the images from my very first roll, developed and scanned by my local lab. I made no adjustments to the scans, just cropped only and the images were shot on the Contax Aria.

The tones on the 50 are beautiful, perfect in even lighting. There is a bit of halation on the images with the bright highlights, you can see it on the second to last image, this happens on the 800 too.

My second roll of Cinestill 50, I shot on the Nikon F100, developed by my local lab and home scanned on the Pakon 135. I only made slight adjustments with Levels and Contrast in Photoshop. Once again, in even lighting, the 50 is perfect and in bright light situation, there is a bit of halation, as in the last image with the olive branches. Not too bad though and it doesn’t really bother me.

Last but not least, my first roll of the Cinestill 800T was shot with the Nikon F100.  I rated the film at ISO 400, as recommended by another Cinestill user. Developed by my local lab and home scanned on the Pakon 135 with color adjustments made while scanning.  The images had to be color balanced with yellow and red since the film is Tungsten based. All images were shot in different lighting situations, open shade, dusk, bright window light and even-light at magic hour. Thanks to my oldest daughter for letting me shoot almost a roll of film with her as model.

All in all, I’ll continue to use this film for personal work and hope to see some of your here on Viewfinders giving it a go in your cameras. I’ll report back on the BW film.