anywhereSF

Day 29: January 29, 2014: Tank Hill

If you follow this project through the year, you’ll probably be seeing a fair amount of this tower. This is my symbol of San Francisco. Not the bridges, not the skyline, not that pointy building downtown, but this, the giant red and white claw reaching out of the fog from one of the City’s highest peaks.

No matter where I’ve been and how long I’ve been gone, whether I’m coming from the North, South, East, or even from the air, Sutro is there to welcome me home, standing high, reaching up through the fog as though the City were trying dig itself out of a moist cloudy grave, and always calmly blinking away. Don’t ever change, Sutro. Don’t ever change.

This was another shot from the new Cinestill 800T film. Of note is the appearance of large halos around the red lights on the tower. One of the main difficulties in adapting the cinema film for a still film process is the different methods used to prevent this halation, which results from light passing through the film, and reflecting back off of the other side of the film or the back of the camera, coming back through to re-expose the film with the effect you see here. Cinema film generally uses a coating that isn’t compatible with normal still film C41 development, so it has to be sent to labs that specialize in cinema development. Unfortunately, there are few of these labs around and they prefer to handle batches of many feet of film at a time, so finding a way to develop small batches of 36 frames is difficult at best. To get around the problem with this film, they’ve stripped that coating off ahead of time, leaving a film that can easily be developed in any standard lab, or at home if you have the equipment. Of course, one of the side effects is the loss of the anti-halation layer, so bright lights are prone to these halos. Is this a flaw, or is it a unique feature to get creative with? That depends on what you’re going for, I suppose, but I prefer to think positive. 🙂

(Cinestill 800T in the new Canon EOS 3)