My Bad Roll of CineStill 800T

I had good luck shooting a few rolls of CineStill 800T a few years ago. For the uninitiated, CineStill is Kodak’s Vision 3 motion picture film that is put through a special process to remove the Remjet layer, making it compatible with C-41 processing. This layer is unique to motion picture film and if you tried to process Vision 3 in C-41 without removing the Remjet, this layer would contaminate the chemistry and foul the process.

My roll of CineStill had been in my Nikon F100 for a long time! And honestly, I cannot even remember when I bought it. I started this roll Christmas 2019 and finished it a few weeks ago. Boutique Film Lab does my processing and when I got the scans back, I had a note from Ryan Tolbert, the lab’s founder and master processor…

“It looks like the roll of Cinestill 800 is affected by a known quality control issue that they had on some batches. The film was not dried properly after the Remjet removal so there are water marks throughout the roll. Cinestill has since fixed this issue.”

Needless to say, most of what I got back was a mess.

Film photography is a journey and not every leg is successful. Here are the few shots I salvaged. First, from 2019…

And from 2021…