The theory behind the two is simple. The practice is not, and knowing which one to use is fundamental.

Starting with the incident meter, or the one with the little white dome on top. You hold it where your subject is and it reads the light falling onto that spot, ignoring what the subject is made of. Dark coat, white wall, doesn’t matter. It measures the light itself, in absolute terms. Shadows read as shadows, highlights read as highlights. That’s why people call it the more accurate reading. You’re measuring incoming light, not the individual light that objects in front of you reflect.

The downside is you have to get close to the subject, or at least stand in the same light conditions. If you’re under a tree in the shade, photographing a billboard baking in the sun, the light at your feet and the light hitting the billboard are two different conditions. An incident reading from where you stand would be wrong. That’s the moment a reflective meter shines.

A reflective meter is the most common one, and also the way more complicated to use. It’s what lives inside your camera. It reads the light that objects reflect back, based on where you point it. Dark things reflect less, so they read dark. Bright things reflect more, so they read bright. Aim it somewhere else and you get a different number, and that's why I say it's more complicated to use.

The easiest way to see this is with a black and white image in your head, that's because B&W images are just a range of blacks, shadows, whites, and highlights on grayscale.

This is where reflective metering gets tricky: where to meter? Where to point the camera at? The complexity comes from the fact that measuring in different places will give you different readings, unlike the incident meter, which gives you an acurate and absolute reading.

For example: imagine a wedding. Do you point at the bride’s white dress or the groom’s dark suit? Two readings, far apart, and neither one is right on its own…

“When in doubt, aim in the middle" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The honest answer is to meter on something neutral, so the shadows naturally fall dark and the highlights stay bright the way they’re meant to. Your film (or sensor) should have a dynamic range wide enough to hold the shadows and the highlights without clipping. When the scene is high contrast and the two ends sit too far apart, you’re in what I think of as a short blanket situation. The blanket can’t cover your head and your feet at once. You pick one. The dynamic range is the blanket.

Also, if this isn't complex enough, there’s a calibration detail underneath all this. These meters are benchmarked against 18% gray. So if you’re on the street and spot a plain gray sidewalk, that’s a good place to set your exposure. Not dark, not bright.

You won’t always have a gray target though. Back to the wedding situation. if you meter off the white dress, the meter will instruct your exposure to turn it into 18% gray, so the dress comes out muddy instead of white, and it should be white, not gray...

Same trap with the dark suit, just the other direction.

Have you experienced that? Share your story in the comments.

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So when there’s no gray to lean on, you carry the rule yourself. What’s bright in real life wants +1 EV to stay bright. What’s dark wants -1 EV to stay dark, with the steps in between. This is the whole reason to shoot in manual, or to learn the exposure compensation feature in your camera, instead of trusting the meter blindly, metering like a newbie and pressing the shutter release button without knowing what you're doing…

The last piece, and a little more advanced, is knowing your dynamic range in stops, for your film or your camera. Look it up on the internet, it’s easy to find. Keep your darks and brights inside that range, and keep the short blanket in mind. Some litght meters allow you to store measurements in memory and calculate the delta in between (some even give you a scale so you can see if you're exceeding a pre-configured dynamic range, the Sekonic ones do that…)

Sometimes, especially on photowalks under the Sun, I like carrying an incident light meter because it's more "set and forget”, and I end up getting consistent exposures that follow the light along my day, that is -that is- if light conditions don't change (like clouds passing by), of course.

This is why using an external light meter requires you being more attentious and aware of your surroundings, you become more familiar with light changes, you remove the crutch, and ultimately, you become a better photographer.

Here are some photos I took using an incident light meter, the Sekonic L-308X-U. Exposure is nailed in every single one, edits are minimal, as you can see per the film border, which is always black, and with consistent coloring on the lettering.

Using a light meter and observing light while shooting is an important exercise that will let you enjoy correctly exposed photographs more and more.

Leaving them inside books isn’t usually an option, because you need books long enough to cover the whole length of the film (God forbid you use multiple books). Laying it on a flat table doesn’t help either, because you need the table for something else. And besides, books are meant to be read, not used as shelves, door stops, or anything other than read.

I tried a lot of techniques to unwarp film, some of them drastic and shitty, like ironing the film with a towel over it. That destroyed the emulsion every single time. I searched online, including forums, YouTube, and Reddit, and couldn’t find anything that actually worked, just a bunch of crap. That’s why I decided to write this ridiculously simple post.

I figured out two ways to do it passively, without an extra heater, cabinet, blower, or whatever. That helps me keep the instructions assertive and short. Great.

I call these methods the “Backwards Respooling” and the “Backwards Mini Roll.” They’re pretty simple, obvious even, but when you’re desperate with a cupped roll, you don’t think about the obvious.

Before we start, let me set the two sides of the frame (no pun intended), so you don’t get confused. Look at the figure below. I’m calling #1 the concave side, and #2 the convex side of the warped film roll.

First, it’s CRUCIAL that the film is COMPLETELY DRY before you try any flattening. With that settled, it’s time for some film chiropractic sessions…

Method #1: The Backwards respooling

For this method, you’re going to roll the film back into the reel, but this time with the concave side OUT (usually the emulsion, but not always). You’ll notice the film doesn’t want to go back onto the spool, because it’s warped and probably conditioned to roll the other way. You might have to route it correctly into the reel for the first loop. Wear cloth gloves for this. Here’s what it should look like:

This method is the least invasive and safer than the second one, though it might take longer to work. The upside is that you can monitor the process along the way by inspecting the reel. Finish rolling it with the concave side out and wait. Since the spool holds the film on both sides, it stays flat and you don’t risk overdoing it.

Close the full loop, and wait…

After 16+ hours, you should have a flat film.

Method #2: The Backwards Mini Roll

I’d risk saying this method is a CameraClara exclusive, because I haven’t seen anyone else do it. I came up with it and refined the process along the way.

It’s more invasive, but more effective. Ideal for extreme warps that look more like the third letter of the alphabet (”C”, in case you missed the reference).

Again, make sure the film is completely dry, or it will stick to itself and jam the whole thing.

You’re going to reuse the backing paper from when you loaded the film into the spool. Grab the adhesive and form a little roll that works as a container, then build a library of them. Here’s a photo of what RafLabs looks like, for instance:

When rolling it back to fit in the cylinder you made, be careful not to scratch the emulsion. Roll it with the concave side out, between your fingers, and pull the tail of the film while holding the other side with your thumb and index finger to reduce the diameter of the roll. Reduce it until it fits one of the pre-made containers.

It will look like this:

Another reason I keep multiple backing paper cylinders is that if I want to open one and inspect, I can just toss it. You don’t want to scratch the film against the paper while it’s tensioned, so to monitor progress you’d have to peel the adhesive and unfold the whole backing paper. You can reassemble it afterward, but it’s just more practical to recycle and grab another one.

When you roll the film to fit the paper cylinder, you might feel you’re doing the wrong thing, forcing it into an uncomfortable position. But remember these films are used to it. They came in a roll tighter than a sardine can, got stored for months (sometimes years, even decades!), and never complained about it on Reddit like humans do.

PS: If you’re doing this with 35mm film, save the plastic tub the canister came in and do it in there. That should be enough, the logic is the same.

Leave a comment if you liked it, disliked it, approved, disapproved, or if you have other techniques. I want to learn and hear from you too!

Thanks for reading ❤️

Converting your own scans is the part of film photography nobody puts on a postcard. I scan with the film borders, so a big chunk of my time goes into cropping, rotating, fixing the rebate, then moving the file from one piece of software to another because the white balance broke or the gamma got encoded wrong somewhere along the way. It works. It’s also a small pile of hacks I’ve made peace with over the years.

So when Yahya Rahhawi reached out about a converter he’s building, I was curious in a tired way. I’ve seen a lot of these. Most do one thing well and leave you needing three other apps to finish the job. My friend told me “I’ve used just about every conversion app out there, and this one by far has been the most complete”. And I completely agree! I’m on the same boat, also used tons of software, and EmberFilm is very promising!

Yahya and I sat down on a Camera Clara livestream and went through an entire roll together, live, with negatives I had scanned that same morning. I’ll post some of the results here, but I strongy recommend watching the whole video.

Yahya is a solo developer. He’s a computer science student finishing his degree, he started shooting black and white in a high school darkroom about four years ago, and the app, EmberFilm, grew out of his own frustration with the conversion process (we’ve all been there!). Before this he made a small open source tool that only removed dust. That one got enough good feedback that he kept going, and EmberFilm is the result of a few months of work and more than fifty beta testers texting him every single day.

What got me is how much is already in there for a first release.

The part I want people to understand first is the AI, because the words “AI” and “film scanning” in the same sentence usually make us all nervous. The software uses machine learning for dust detection, for the auto crop that finds your frame inside the border, and for white balance. The dust model is the clever one. It reads the actual RGB pixels, no infrared channel, and it still finds the specks and paints them out while keeping the grain intact.

And all that runs on locally on the machine.

I repeat. Every single AI feature runs in my machine only. Nothing gets uploaded. Your scans never leave your laptop, the models are compressed to run locally, and there’s no account, no cloud, no app quietly phoning home to a server somewhere. Yahya was clear about this on the stream and I think it matters. This is a good use of AI.

The other thing I kept noticing was the one button conversion. You import the roll, you hit convert, and the scans come out looking right. That sounds basic. A lot of converters still get it wrong, and you end up babysitting every frame to make it usable. EmberFilm treats a project like a roll, reads the white balance once, and keeps it consistent across the whole strip, which is most of what I actually want from a converter.

Now the part I cared about most. EmberFilm doesn’t push its own look on you. It doesn’t bake in a LUT to fake a “filmic” result and call it a day. It pulls the information out of the negative, the way a Frontier or a Noritsu does, and hands you a clean, flexible file you can take wherever you want. If you feel like adding a print look later, you can. That’s your call, not the app deciding for you. Portra 400 should look like Portra 400. One version of it, please.

We hit a couple of bugs on the stream. An export that failed, a zoom that crashed because I zoomed in to roughly a billion percent. Beta things. None of it changed my read. The conversions were fast on 80-something megabyte GFX files, the memory use stayed around half a gigabyte, and the results were genuinely good.

EmberFilm is Mac only for now, still in beta, with a waitlist on the site. No firm release date yet.

Info and Links

The app lives at emberfilm.app, where you can join the beta waitlist. The instagram is @emberfilm.app.

One flag: there’s also an Instagram account called @ember_films (plural, with an underscore), that one does NOT belong to the app rather than some unrelated video outfit. Check it before you link it.

This was our first livestream with Yahya and I doubt it’ll be the last. He’s that rare developer who’s also the user, and I want to keep following where this goes. For the record, nobody paid for this post. I just liked the software and contacted him out via Instagram. Thank you, Yahya! 💪 🇮🇶 🎞️ ✨

Last Saturday I went anyway. Weekend, sure. Crowded, yes. I brought the Hassel and a roll of Ektar and figured I would just deal with the people, wait until I had clean frames, things like that.

The cherry blossoms were long gone. June offers a different game. Roses everywhere, meadow flowers doing their loose, messy thing. I think summer might be the honest season here. If Spring is the postcard, June is the garden actually living.

Without a proper light meter, I followed the Sunny16 rule, which barely fails. If yo udon't know the Sunny16, it's pretty simple: on a sunny day, you use 1/ISO as shutter speed (1/100 if ISO100, 1/400 if ISO400, etc.), and set your aperture to f/16. Done! You are in EV 15 zone, typical for shooting under sunlight.

Since my camera doesn't have a 1/100 shutter speed, I used 1/125 - it's fine. Exposure was not always perfect, but I was able to slightly push/pull some sliders when converting, and voilá. Look at these Ektar 100 colors…

Ektar was a deliberate choice here, I left home with it loaded in the camera. It is the most saturated color negative Kodak makes nowadays (finest grain too). People describe it as slide film with a safety net, all that punch and contrast but with the forgiving latitude of a negative. And i agree!

Bright daylight is exactly when Ektar comes alive. I am happy with the results!

By the way, Camera Clara runs on no sponsors and no ad money. If these posts are worth something to you, a paid subscription is what keeps them coming, and keeps me honest about what I actually shoot! Join the club!

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What it wanted, it turns out, looked right. The blues went deep and a little electric, the reds stayed rich, and the cool cast sat on the chrome in a way I liked more than a "correct" version would have. There is no right or wrong here. There is the film you have and the cars in front of you, and sometimes they just agree.

I went in expecting halation because I could see it coming when framing: little stars of specular light bouncing off bumpers, off a hood, off a headlight rim. 800T is known for haloing those bright points in red, and in a dark night scene it can bloom hard. Here, in daylight at box speed, the highlights were small and tight, so the red glow stayed gentle, I like saying the’re sexy without being too vulgar, looks like medium format. A soft ring around a headlight instead of an explosion. On 35mm that restraint reads as elegant rather than a gimmick. I'll take it.

The cars earned the trip. There was a deep blue Maserati with a tartan umbrella tossed on the rear shelf and a sticker in the window telling the diet exactly where to go, which felt like the most honest thing at the whole event. A red Mercedes 380SL on Jersey plates, parked next to a white roadster wearing a small American flag. A dark blue Ferrari with a period New York plate, all that bodywork folding the sky into itself.

And then the one I keep coming back to. I half-recognized it on the day, and a little digging confirmed it: the red roadster on my last three frames is a 1957 BMW 507, brought by Gooding Christie's as the auction centerpiece. BMW built only a few hundred, and this was one of 34 Series 1 cars. I didn't know any of that when I shot it. I just liked the shape. The giveaway is sitting right there in my interior frames, two little Christie's cushions on the seats. I photographed the star of the morning without realizing it.

This is the part where I say something about Leica, and I mean it. The store didn’t need to host a car meet. It did, with Duane Wilson of Porsche Stimmung, because the people who fuss over a hand-built lens are usually the same ones who notice a perfectly set ride height. That overlap is the whole point. Leica stays a strong brand less for any single camera and more for mornings like this one, where the gear is the excuse and the community is the thing that actually shows up. You don’t build that with a spec sheet.

I have more frames from that day still waiting, shot on Kodak VERITA 200D (the new prohibited film for photographers), the new daylight-balanced cinema stock that I’m about to run through ECN-2 at home. After a roll of tungsten film bent to fit a sunny morning, I want to see what a film that actually wants the daylight does with the same cars. More on that when it’s dry.

I’ll do another post when I develop the ECN-2 film. Don’t send that to Kodak.

If you like this kind of thing, film, old cars, and the small accidents that make a frame, subscribe to Camera Clara and pass it to the one friend who’ll get it.

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Here is the project I mentioned: Hope in Shadows.

You can find their website here. It’s such a beautiful and nice project!

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And there it was. Blue and orange across the top of the buildings, as expected, the Empire State Building leading the line. The river caught all of it and threw it back in purple and orange, the Knicks colors.

I shot this on the Fujifilm GFX 100s. Tripod, long exposure, the water doing most of the work. 53 years of waiting, and the whole skyline knew it. I intentionally happened to be across the river with my camera!

If you know a Knicks fan and would like to give them a gift (as well as support an independent photographer like myself), I made prints of this. Note that shipping is included (and that’s half of the price).

Manhattan Knicks 2026 - Fine Art Print

I can sign the photo upon request. Buy it on the link below.

Manhattan Knicks 2026 - Fine Art Print

Shooting CineStill 800T in there felt right, the tungsten lights bouncing off metal shelves, that signature halation glowing around every bulb in the dark corridors. Funny how the reading room gets all the attention but the real magic is in the machinery behind it, the Arabic boxes, the Valentine's Manuals from the 1920s, books from 1860, the endless rows of newspaper. Huge thanks to the Kimi who let me see it all.

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A tiny piece of history

Leica released this design in 1998. It is a five-element, five-group block focusing formula. One polished aspherical element. Two anomalous partial dispersion glass elements. Two high-refractive-index elements. Anodized aluminum body, built-in slide-out hood, 55mm filter thread. Minimum focus is 1 meter, reproduction ratio 1:9, weight approximately 480 grams. The full specification can be found here.

A historical note worth knowing. This was the first Leica lens to use a polished asphere rather than a pressed one. That manufacturing leap is what unlocked the apochromatic correction. Real APO means the lens brings three wavelengths of light to the same focal plane (most lenses correct only two). It is the optical definition of “no excuses.”

On a Leica M body

The lens weighs approximately 480 grams. It's heavy. On an M body, it pulls forward noticeably. I find myself supporting the front with my left hand by default, which I rarely do with a 35 or 50.

The 90mm frame line on the MP is small. It lives inside the larger 28mm frame, the two are shown together as a pair when you mount the lens. This is the part film shooters need to internalize. You compose inside a postage stamp. If you shoot mostly with 35 and 50, your eye needs to recalibrate, orf you get a Light Lens Lab 1.4x viewfinder magnifier.

What APO means on film

This is where things get interesting. APO correction is talked about constantly in digital reviews. On film the conversation is different.

For color negative work, APO correction shows up in two concrete ways. First, edge transitions on high-contrast subjects stay clean. Color fringing on backlit subjects is effectively absent. Second, skin tones hold their gradation into the shadows rather than collapsing.

On Portra 400, which already renders skin with a lot of latitude and subtlety, the APO design means you are not losing tonal information to chromatic aberration on top of everything else the emulsion is doing. The two work in the same direction…

Wide open behavior

At f/2 the lens is already sharp corner to corner. This is unusual for a fast tele. Most 90mm lenses ask you to stop down to f/4 to clean up. Not this one. Resolution wide open easily out-resolves any 35mm film stock, which is exactly the point. The bottleneck is be the emulsion, not the glass.

Vignetting is the number that surprises people. Fast telephoto lenses routinely show more than one stop of light falloff wide open, with some over two stops. This lens measures as essentially negligible at f/2.

For portraits this matters more than in landscape work, because a corner that is even a third of a stop darker will read differently in the skin tones of a face at the frame edge. On Portra 400 that kind of subtle density shift would be visible.

Stopping down one stop to f/2.8 produces a slight but measurable improvement, as the lens is not quite at its absolute peak wide open, but it is close enough that the difference is irrelevant on film. By f/4 it is fully resolved. Diffraction starts to soften the image around f/11. The practical sharpness window for film is f/2 through f/8, with f/4 being the sweet spot for architecture and anything requiring corner-to-corner uniformity.

One caveat for night work: bokeh from point light sources shows visible onion-ring structures due to the aspherical element. On film grain softens it, but it is present. Portra 400 at night around city lights will surface it in bright highlights. It rarely ruins a frame, but you should know it exists.

Focusing it on a rangefinder

The honest part. Depth of field at f/2 and 1 meter is shallow enough that the math works out close to a 50mm f/1.1. On the unmagnified 0.72x finder of an M body, that is hard.

I miss focus more often with this lens than with anything else in my bag. Not by a lot. But enough to matter. A 1.25x or 1.4x viewfinder magnifier helps. So does shooting at f/2.8 or f/4 when the situation allows it.

If your M rangefinder is even slightly out of calibration, you will see it here first. Wide open at minimum focus distance is the most punishing test of rangefinder accuracy in any 35mm system.

Bokeh and rendering

Bokeh is smooth in most situations. Out-of-focus highlights are round in the center and start to lemon-shape toward the corners by f/2.8. Stopping down brings back inwardly curved aperture blade artifacts on bright spots.

Where it falls short

The size and weight cut against the M-system ethos. This is not a walkaround lens for a long day.

The minimum focus distance of 1 meter is conservative. The 75 APO Summicron focuses to 0.7m and gets you significantly more dramatic separation as a result. The 90 also lacks a floating element, which the 75 has, so close-distance performance is technically a notch behind in optical terms.

Price is hard to justify on rational grounds. New it is around $6k. Used in good condition runs roughly two to three thousand. The Voigtlander APO-Skopar 90 f/2.8 covers most of the optical performance for a fraction of the cost, but I got one and had to return because it came with focus misaligned, that's how I ended getting this Leica lens, I paid $2k on mine in absolute Mint condition, a rare find.

Final take

This is the most optically perfect lens I have ever put on a film camera. There is no character in the old Mandler sense. No glow. No softness. It renders what is in front of it with brutal precision. For some film shooters that will feel sterile. For documentary work and landscape it is exactly right. I personally like relying on the film stock for personality, like the 800T halation, etc.

The deeper question is that film is forgiving. Grain hides detail. The very things APO correction was designed to eliminate, like color fringing, aberrations, tonal collapse, which are sometimes the things that give older glass its look. So you have to ask yourself what you actually want from a 90mm.

For me the answer leans yes. Portra 400 and the APO work in the same direction because the film handles the character, the lens handles the precision.

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The first contact sheet made it obvious. my pictures are now more frontal, more centered, more symmetric than anything I shoot on 35mm (or with any other rectangular ratio). The square ratio forced me to read the scene differently. With no long side to lean on, I had to rethink where the element sits, which is not a hard task, I must say though, because I can just aim for the center and it yelds great results!

There’s a name for when the media of something makes you change the content of it, and it comes from outside photography. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message (which by a typo from the editor, became “massage”, and he kept it that way). The short version of the idea: the form of a medium reshapes how we perceive things, more than the content it carries. Television changed us more than any specific show ever did. The format works on you before the content arrives.

Back to McLuhan, the frame is a medium too. The rectangular frame most of us shoot is not a law of nature. It came from cinema film running sideways through early cameras. We inherited it and treated it as neutral.

Inside a square, the rule of thirds loses much of its force. My compositions weren’t working, so I stopped reaching for it and started centering subjects, looking for symmetry, photographing things head on, and it worked pretty much well on the square format! A good reminder that the rule of thirds was always a rule, never a law by the way…

It helps that this camera is an SLR, meaning I see through the lens, on a focusing screen with a cross etched in the middle. I can square up a façade and level a horizon with a precision my rangefinders never allowed. Framelines guess. A ground glass shows. More satisfaction to things at the center of stuff.

In a rectangle I’m always fighting the corners, pushing out things that don’t belong to the image. The wider the lens, the worse the battle. The square does part of that exclusion for me. Less frame to manage, more attention left for what I actually want in the picture, when paired to a 80mm, it becomes easy and inspiring to go out to shoot with. It’s at the same time more simple, more primary, and… more beautiful.

Square format is awesome!

Part of what drew me to this system is that everything is modular. Body, lens, finder, film back, all separate pieces. The plan is to add a digital back someday and turn half of my analog kit into a digital camera overnight. That’s a future post, and only milions of subscribers would be able to help me funding a Hasselblad digital back!

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Thanks ( ꩜ ᯅ ꩜ ) — means a lot !

Ah! And one bonus I didn’t see coming. Instagram wants vertical. Substack reads horizontal on a desktop. For my whole life I’ve been quietly shooting for two masters, and it’s annoying as hell. The square is the one format both accept without complaint. One photograph, two homes? Score!

Of course you don’t need a fancy camera to play the square game photo thing, and here’s my invitation. Crop a few favorites to 1:1 and watch what survives. Better yet, dig through your camera’s menu for the setting that records square, so the viewfinder shows you a square while you shoot. Cropping changes the file. Composing in a square changes the photographer. I suggest you trying out (and posting the results in the comments section!).

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In this episode I talk about the technical and philosophical differences between shooting film and digital. Not in a gear way. More in a mindset way. Why film forces you to read light differently, what the ISO lock teaches you about creative constraints, why the contact sheet is the most honest mirror a photographer can have, and what happens to your thinking when you only have 36 frames left.

Leave a comment below or write to podcast@cameraclara.com. I’ll read your messages in the next episode. It's my first time doing this, so please also let me know what do you think about the overall thing: did I do it right? What would you like to listen? How about the form and structure?

And also, subscribe to CameraClara here on Substack, as that helps me a ton!

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As you can see, the PAN 200 has enough latitude in the emulsion that I could push the contrast slider pretty hard in post without things falling apart. Highlights stayed under control, shadows held detail. The PAN 100 is cleaner, great for bright daylight. Both were shot on my Mamiya 7ii and developed by myself. I didn’t pull or push. Shot both stocks at box speed.

The grain

I’ll add some 1:1 crops here so you can see exactly what you’re working with at full resolution. Scanned on a GFX 100s at 102 MP.

The grain on the 200 is what I’d call honest. It looks like 200 ISO film should look. Controlled, present, not trying to fake the smoothness of a 100. But the real surprise is the 100. The grain structure is genuinely good, maybe the best thing about this stock. At 1:1 you can see it’s tight and even, nothing muddy or chunky about it.

The Tri-X comparison nobody asked for but I’m making anyway :P

I’ve been shooting Tri-X for some time now. It’s a classic for a reason. But recently I’ve had a few quality control issues: faded lettering on the film strip, and weird tonal shifts across different frames of the same roll. That’s not something you expect from a professional-grade emulsion.

The Kentmere is cheaper and, at least in my recent testing, more consistent. I’m not ready to say it’s a better film in every way, but for street photography in good light, it punches well above its price. I might rotate it in as a Tri-X replacement for a while and see how it holds up over many rolls.

Where to find it

Kentmere is made by Harman, the same company behind ILFORD. A roll runs around $7, which makes it one of the most affordable medium-format black-and-white options available right now. The PAN 200 is newer, released in 2025. I’d start there if you’ve never shot Kentmere before.

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Sergio is a documentary photographer from Mexico. He’s been at this for over twenty years, working independently, no gallery contracts, no institutional backing. His approach stays personal and direct: focused on people, movement, and moments that don’t need explaining.

His most known series is Queremos ver sangre (”We want to see blood”), a body of work shot in 2014 at the legendary Arena México.

The series goes back to his own childhood, to an early fascination with the world of Mexican wrestling, a spectacle that merges discipline, risk, theatricality, and popular folklore. Those nights still echo in his memory: the chants of “¡los rudos, los rudos!”, the crowd charged and shouting. “Queremos ver sangre” is a demand for total commitment from the fighter, for the willingness to put the body on the line and become something mythical.

Sergio sees lucha libre as a social phenomenon, a space for catharsis where many stories and emotions converge. On the ring, you have the physical fight. But something very powerful also happens below: people shout, release their emotions, project their frustrations. Some wrestlers interact with the audience, mocking or challenging them. He’s photographing all of that, not just the acrobatics.

A New York gallerist acquired two pieces from the series, opening the door for him in the contemporary art world. That’s what brought him here, and the work has been showing around the city since. In 2025, he received the Excellence in Visual Arts Award at the Mexican Music Awards, recognized on the screens of Times Square.

At the B&H talk, he was candid about what it actually takes to build this kind of career outside of Mexico. New York is a place where every artist from any discipline wants to be seen. Every trip involves expenses and time. People are still getting to know him there, and finding spaces or connections is harder than in Mexico City, where he has roots and speaks the same language as his audience. He didn’t complain about it. He said something closer to: these are the uncomfortable places you need to put yourself in to grow.

After the talk, we stepped outside. There’s a cop who works traffic right in front of B&H, and within minutes she was talking to Sergio, laughing, making her feel completely at ease. This got me thinking a lot that photography is about connecting people, and Sergio is a natural, because he is genuinely interested on what other people has to say. He’s there for the others, and THAT’S what makes him a great photographer. No gear talk, no bullshit. Just art, feelings, connections, emotions.

As many of you know, I am Brazilian, and due to that, I’ve been to many photography festivals in Brazil. In these, I had the chance of meeting people and having conversations with great names of photography, like Sebastião Salgado (rest in peace, my friend), Claudio Edinger, Evandro Teixeira (also rest in peace, my friend), and I can tell you with no mistake: I felt the same energy coming from Sergio. He is a great photographer and a great humanist.

They exchanged Instagrams. I photographed both of them. The whole thing lasted maybe five minutes and felt completely natural, like he’d known her for years. That’s just who he is. People gravitate toward him. I think it says something about why his documentary work is what it is. He got her trust in minutes, which is the most important talent a documentarist photographer must have.

I think that’s worth keeping in mind when looking at his work. Twenty-plus years of this. No shortcuts.

There’s something I keep thinking about after that talk. Photography isn’t about gear. It’s about culture, about people who dedicate their lives to documenting something real. Independent artists like Sergio are the ones keeping that alive, doing the work without institutional support, without shortcuts, just because they believe the story deserves to be told.

I was lucky to meet him through Brian when he came to New York. And I have a feeling that in a few years, a lot more people will know his name.

If you want to own a piece of his work, prints from the Queremos ver sangre series are available at shop.sergiomelendez.com.mx.

You can also follow Sergio on Instagram at @sergio.melendez and see more at sergiomelendez.com.mx.

I went looking through the Magnum site the other night and ended up in their store, where you can buy reproductions of Pablo Inirio‘s darkroom prints. Inirio has been the master printer at Magnum’s New York office since the early nineties. He has printed some of the most recognizable photographs of the last century, and the sheets for sale are his working prints, covered in pencil: circles, arrows, numbers. The numbers are seconds. How long to hold light back from a face. How long to let more of it fall on a sky.

One of them is Thomas Hoepker’s 1966 portrait of Muhammad Ali, the young champion with his fist filling the frame. You have seen it, with or without the names attached. What rarely occurs to anyone is that the version living in your memory was assembled in a darkroom, second by second, by a man almost nobody can name. Let’s inspect it.

This sent me back to the word itself. Photography. Writing with light. We talk as though the writing happens in the camera, in the single click, but the camera only does half the job. More light writing comes afterward, in the darkroom print. Dodging and burning is the one part of the process that does precisely what the word promises: you take a beam and decide, inch by inch, what the viewer is allowed to read.

Why the darkroom tells the story

Picture a man on the pavement outside a shop, his reflection faint in the glass, a mannequin in an expensive coat above him. Print it one way, hold the glass dark and lift only the coat, and the story becomes the distance between him and a warmth he can see but might never reach. Print it another way, raise his reflection until his face floats beside the mannequin, and it becomes a man considering who he used to be. The same negative. Nobody moved. The story was written after the shutter, in the dark.

None of this is new, and the people who treat editing as a betrayal are usually quarreling with their own heroes. Ansel Adams, the patron saint of getting it right in camera, said the negative was the score and the print the performance. He also said, only half seriously, that dodging and burning correct the mistakes God made in the tonal relationships. W. Eugene Smith put the darkroom at something near ninety percent of the work. Cartier-Bresson rarely printed his own negatives at all. Salgado never printed his own work either, leaving it to master printers like Philippe Bachelier in Paris.

So, a small rant. While the film hipsters treat computer editing as a sin, the photographers I just named built entire careers on pictures finished in the darkroom.

Once you have spent enough time with photography and knowing the chances of knowing if a photo was edited or not just by eyeballing it, the sermon gets hard to take seriously. The purist frets about editing while his own camera edits on his behalf. Look at what actually happens, especially with the Fujifilm crowd who refuse to shoot RAW and commit to a film simulation instead.

An X100V loaded with Classic Neg or Acros is running a digital impression of Fuji’s own film. True enough. But think about it: that impression was made in a fraction of a second by engineers in Japan he will never meet. The lab scan he trusts is the same arrangement, the hand simply belonging to a machine. There is no untouched photograph. There never was.

Most of the famous photographs you have seen are edited. The only real question is who did the editing, and whether they meant to. Leaving the decision to a machine is still a decision. It is only a quieter one. The editing is always there.

Back to that Ali photograph. Three people made it: Muhammad Ali in front of the lens, Thomas Hoepker behind it, Pablo Inirio in the dark long after. One image, and the word photography has been quietly dividing the credit

About 350 people. Nobody with a camera on their neck at the line.

Inside: a house with models, continuous lighting, a queue to shoot them. Photographers holding 70-200mm lenses in a room barely 100 sqft. I watched for a bit and genuinely wasn't sure what I was supposed to do either. Should I photograph these people?

On a corridor, someone told me: “Leica M!”

I had the M7. He, a Q3. The conversation drifted into millimeters, summicron, summiluxes, comparing specs like stupid teenagers compare dick sizes at a public restroom, with discretion, but noticing who has the best. The kind of talk that happens when there’s nothing left to say about photography.

I left the event and on the bus back home, I kept thinking: why does nobody asks what paintbrush Michelangelo used?

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Because…

Real photographers are the writers of light

I heard this in a recent conversation and it stayed with me. The photographer is the writer of light. The camera is the pen. You don’t ask about the pen brand when someone writes well.

When photography is the conversation, the camera is a tool. When the camera is the conversation, photography isn't.

The obsession with gear isn’t new (and not exclusive to photography, musical instruments also suffer a lot from it), but it got amplified by a system that profits from it because digital cameras run on firmware. Firmware ages, and Apple did the world a favor to release new models every year, influencing the whole industry to copy it.

Wiith that, every annual release turns what you bought into last year’s model. The stores and brands know exactly what they’re doing, and the people who fall for it aren’t naive. They’re victims of a cycle built with precision.

How we got here

After thinking around it, I think I followed the thread to its roots.

Around the 2010s, an idea started spreading: understanding the history of photography was a waste of time. Videos needed to be shorter. Who had time to study references?

There's even a book called “The Anxious Generation", that I super recommend, where Jonatan Haidt talks about something called "the great rewiring", relating to teenagers who are the first wave of being a victim of what I wrote in the beforementioned paragraph.

Twenty(ish) years later, now in 2026, we’re seeing the results.

A whole generation without roots, without a past, without any grounding in painting or photojournalism, anxious for posting what they captured, one that treats using a slow shutter to blur move as a life hack learned from an Instagram Reel, when it’s actually something that happens naturally once you understand the exposure triangle during the first hour of a real photography class.

EnGaGeMenT is the fucking word of that madness.

A Brazilian photographer who is a teacher for 40 years told me that his new students are having blurry photos because they take the photo and instantly pull the camera to see the photo they took in the LCD, when used in 1/30th of a sec, that act would blur the shot.

Did you pay attention in what I just wrote? People are getting blurry pictures because their muscular memory makes them swipe the camera to see the photos they just took. They photograph with the viewfinder and instantly go to the LCD, shaking the camera while still shooting.

Then came the second layer: "photography is art, so everything is valid, respect my opinion". You couldn’t criticize anything. The argument was bulletproof. The misguided notion of unrestricted creative freedom crept into artistic discourse.

And then the third: “Learn photography without the physics/math jargon. Straight to the point, no fluff.”

An entire generation got convinced that technique, culture and references were the fluff!!!!

The result? No references, no room for criticism (this one kills me). Photographers using flash by trial and error, no idea what to do with more than two lights in a studio, or where to meter in a silhuette street situation. What did they become? People who press buttons.

What separates the two?

An experienced Brazilian photographer and guru, friend of mine, Renato Rocha Miranda, told me he once worked as an assistant to Márcio Scavone during Rio Carnival. One of the fifty greatest portrait photographers in the world (according to Hasselblad). On the day they went out, Renato left his gear at home. He just wanted to watch Scavone work.

He realized that experienced photographers see the image before lifting the camera, like TENS OF SECONDS BEFORE. Last week, walking past a street fair, I spotted two nuns crossing at a crosswalk, each holding a hot dog. I ran ahead of them, dialed in exposure and pre-focus before reaching my position. The photo existed in my head before it existed on film, now it's latent in an emulsion waiting to be developed.

The time it takes you to realize a photo is about to happen is exactly the time you have to make it. That only comes from references, study, and time.

No shortcuts.

References don’t mean knowing everything. They mean having accumulated enough to calibrate what works. I made a photo of a pizzeria in Hoboken that a friend compared to Hopper’s Nighthawks. I didn’t know Hopper. I went and looked, felt the weight of it, and understood I needed to absorb more photographic culture, because references are the most direct way to understand what works and what doesn’t, and I think this post is the ultimate summary of that mindset, inside my mind.

I think that I took a while to realize hat because although studying culture is more accessible and cheap, it's more rare, boring, and scarce. Just compare how many online photography courses will teach you the exposure triangle, versus how many will talk about culture, references, Louis Daguerre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, the zone system, Saul Leiter, etc.

Gear has its place

Of course it matters. With time, study and work, you deserve good tools. There's an irony buried in this whole conversation: the people who end up with expensive gear are usually the ones who took photography seriously enough to buy it. And they only reach the conclusion that equipment isn't the point after years of that same dedication. So when someone with a $10,000 Leica says gear doesn't matter, the Leica itself undermines the argument. The credibility is already gone.

So regardless of what you hear (from experience people or not), GAS might hit.

If GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) hits, here's a blast-radius control tip: buying a lens makes more sense than a new body. Bodies depreciate every year through firmware updates. Lenses are optics, analog. The improvement gap between lens versions is smaller, and they hold their value far better. Each prime teaches you a way of seeing: a 35mm is one school, an 85mm is another.

“Easy to say that when you shoot Leica and have a Summilux.” I hear it bro, but a better (smarter) question would be if Michelangelo would've produced what he produced with cheap brushes, not whether he had the best ones.

Joe Dart, the highly-talented bassist for Vulfpeck, switched from his expensive touring bass to a cheap one. The logic was simple: if it breaks mid-tour, walk into any Guitar Center and replace it. Check out this amazing promo video, where Joe plays at the end…

I beg you to check it out and rethink if you’re thinking too much about equipment, while negleting culture, philosophy, references, gleries, art, just the same way a musician favors instruments rather than scales, chord progression, sheet music, etc.

What I observe

The most mediocre photography events I attend share one thing: everyone comparing bodies, sensors and megadixels.

The interesting ones? The conversation is about photographers, books, galleries, references. Cameras come up with an actual reduced exposure (ha! no pun intended).

That’s not a coincidence, and here's a good post to start with, if you want to break that paradigm, here's a post for you:

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The AGO Film Processor is a compact, rechargeable device that converts your existing Paterson tank into an automatic rotary processor. You just need to warm up your chemistry, attach the AGO to the tank, press start, and babysit the thing. No stopwatch in hand, no manual agitation needed.

The AGO’s secret

The star feature is Active Time Compensation. As your chemicals cool during development, the AGO monitors the temperature in real time and adjusts the remaining time automatically. You don’t need to hover with a thermometer. You don’t need to compensate manually. The machine tracks the drift and does the math while you make a sandwich (or espresso, if you know me…). Many people think it warms up and keep chemicals temperature though, it doesn’t, it just monitors and compensates time for you according to the chemistry’s instruction manual guidance.

Agitation is rotary and continuous. This produces more consistent negatives and since the tank stays horizontal, it cuts chemistry use by up to 60% compared to standard agitation. For C-41, where you’re reusing developer across multiple rolls, those savings accumulate fast.

Here’s a table from VintageVisual’s website comparing the advantages of AGO.

Presets for different chemicals/recipes

Getting started is easier than any review made it sound when I first looked this thing up. The AGO ships with built-in presets for the most common processes: C-41, E-6, black and white, RA-4 paper. For most people, that covers everything. You pick your process, load it up, and go. When you develop multiple rolls with the same chemistry and need to bump development time to account for exhaustion, you adjust the preset and you’re done. Custom programs are managed through the AGO’s built-in Wi-Fi from your phone or computer, and it’s genuinely simple.

There’s one setup step people worry about more than they should. Three holes need to be drilled into the funnel of your Paterson tank so chemistry can flow in and out during rotary mode. Vintage Visual includes an adhesive drilling template, and the whole thing takes about four minutes. They also sell pre-drilled funnels if you’d rather skip it entirely. After that, you forget it ever happened.

Battery and design

A few more practical details worth knowing. The unit charges via USB-C and the battery life is impressive. The AGO picked up a Red Dot Award and a TIPA World Award in 2025, and is trusted by over 3,000 film photographers across more than 30 countries.

There are a few minor complaints worth being honest about. The bottom of the unit isn’t rubberized nor water sealed, so it slides on a smooth counter and water might get in if you’re not cautious. Pouring chemistry through the small opening takes some practice. The USB-C charging port has no cover, something Vintage Visual has acknowledged and is addressing in newer builds. None of this would stop me from recommending it. I added some rubber feet, as well as electrical tape around my unit, for better water-sealing.

Customer Support

Vintage Visual’s Discord and support are some of the best I’ve come across in the film photography world. Questions get answered fast, firmware updates ship regularly, and it feels like a team that actually uses the product. That community matters more than most gear reviews give it credit for, especially when your chemicals are at temperature at 11pm and something looks slightly off.

The price is €439, around $529 USD. For what it does, and how much it changed the way I develop and ultimately how much I shoot, I think about that number for about two seconds every time I remember what this workflow looked like before.

This is a preliminary review, not a full breakdown. If you want the detailed version covering specific film stocks, chemistry comparisons, and a full walkthrough of the software, drop a comment below. If enough of you are interested, I’ll make it happen.

You can buy one from this link, also, check their blog. I don’t get any commision and I’m here just to write nice things for you.

Consider subscribing to Camera Clara if you liked this article. It’s free. No spam, never, I promise.

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Dev results

Is it any good? You might ask. Well… almost every photo you see here in CameraClara has been developed by RafLabs, has been with the AGO, here are a couple of examples:

This past weekend I photographed João Bosco in Princeton. If his name does not ring a bell, take a few minutes and listen to Incompatibilidade de Gênios, or anything from his catalog with Aldir Blanc. He is one of the great Brazilian songwriters alive, a guitarist whose humbleness, lyrics, narratives and techniques reshaped what a single acoustic guitar could do, and at 79 he still tours like someone with something to prove. He trained as an engineer before music took him in another direction.

Most of the stage photos I am sharing here come from the sound check. Honestly, this is when I prefer to shoot artists. The room is empty, the band is loose, and I can walk right up to the stage without elbowing anyone. That mattered for this shoot in particular, because I was working with a 65mm lens on the Mamiya 7ii (a 35mm equivalent on full frame) and a 35mm on the Leica M7. Both lenses ask you to get close. During a real concert that is impossible. During a sound check, it is exactly the point.

I shot everything on Kodak Tri-X, 35mm and medium format. Nolan shot Oppenheimer on Double-X, the cinema cousin of the same emulsion, for the parts of the film grounded in fact. Same family, different format, same instinct. Color would have been wrong. Color would have explained too much, and some things don’t need explanation because they’re just beautiful.

The day before the concert, we got a surprise. Since João had been invited to perform by the director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), the director offered us a private tour. The IAS is not open to the public. It is a working research institute, and you only walk through those halls if someone there invites you. We were invited.

I left the film cameras in the car because I thought we were going on a normal campus walk, not into the actual rooms. Inside the offices I used my phone to register the moment.

We stood inside the office that was once Oppenheimer’s, and is still used by the current director. We also stood inside Einstein’s office.

We walked through the library at Fuld Hall, where both of them worked. João, Angela, and the family were quiet inside those rooms. There is a particular silence people fall into when they understand where they are standing.

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I kept thinking about it on the drive home. Both men trained in technical disciplines before their work moved past the technical and into something the world remembers. Standing in that office, the parallel did not feel like a stretch. It felt like the reason we had been invited.

I want to say something honest, and I hope it does not sound like false modesty. I was there because Julia Bosco, Angela, and Guto Wirtti are friends of mine. Real friends. The kind of friends who feel like family, who think to include you in something like this, who pick up the phone and say come with us. Julia is João's daughter. Angela is his wife. Guto has been his bass player for years. Kiko and Ricardo are João’s bandmates, also my friends. They are all brilliant, generous, funny, and curious, and the fact that I get to stand close to them, to photograph them, to share a weekend like this one, is something I do not take for granted. I felt lucky to be alive. Lucky to be Brazilian. Lucky that the people I love also happen to be the people I most admire.

These photos matter to me more than most things I have made this year. The moment was real. That is what matters, more than the names involved. A Brazilian artist, a Brazilian photographer, both standing inside a building where the 20th century turned, on a weekend in New Jersey. Tri-X seemed like the only honest way to record it.

This makes the pitch for CineStill Df96 hard to resist. One bath, three minutes (fresh chems), flexible room temperature, add 15 seconds per roll. No stop, no fix, no second pour. For anyone new to home developing, or anyone tired of juggling chemistry bottles, it sounds like the easy path into black and white, right?

Well...

And in some ways, it is. The chemistry really is simpler because the chemical does it all.

The process, though, hides complexity the marketing doesn’t talk about much. In this post I want to focus on one thing in particular that surprised me, and that I think surprises most Df96 users who come from traditional developers.

Starting with the fact that…

The Df96 Monobath uses temperature for pushing, not time

Df96 as part of a small family of “unconventional” developers rather than a one-of-a-kind oddity.

Most traditional black and white developers treat temperature as the constant you hold. For instance, you stick with a specific temperature and you vary the time to push or pull. Dev charts for D-76, HC-110, DD-X, or Rodinal all assume this structure: pick a target temperature and vary time. A Tri-X at 400 in HC-110 is one time. Same film pushed to 1600 is a longer time. Temperature stays put.

The CineStill Df96 monobath flips this logic around. The time is a checkpoint, not a knob. According to the manual, 3 minutes at 27°C/80°F is the minimum time needed for the developer to complete and the fixer to finish its job (with constant agitation [recommended]). In order to push the film a stop, you gotta raise the bath temperature by 10°F (about 6°C). Lowering the temperature pulls it.

This relation between three variables: agitation method, temperature, and time, render a difference. In other words, this is a small shift in thinking that has big consequences.

With a traditional developer, a two or three degree drift during development is a mild inconvenience you can correct with a time adjustment later (or even by rebringing the roll to a bath), or just shrug off. With Df96, that same drift is a half-stop push or pull you won’t see until you scan, that makes the Df96 something more complex than it looks, and might defeat the purpose of the simplicity of just using one bottle to rule them all.

That’s why CineStill sells a water heater/circulator

Worth noticing: CineStill themselves sell a water circulator on their site. It’s a sous vide unit dressed up for film work. The product exists because temperature control matters more than the “any room temperature” marketing suggests for their products, both for the Monobath and the Cs41 Color Simplified 2-bath kit (but that’s expected).

You can develop at any temperature in the 65-95°F range and get an image. But if you care about consistency across a roll, a month, or an archive, the temperature of that bath matters more than it would with other B&W chemicals.

OK, the water circulator solves half the problem because your chemistry reaches target temperature. But you’re still agitating by hand in a vertical tank, and “intermittent” is still whatever you think it is.

The agitation question is what makes it complex

The second thing that surprised me is agitation. CineStill’s Df96 manual gives three recipes for fresh chemicals:

3 min at 80°F with constant agitation
4 min at 75°F with intermittent agitation
6 min at 70°F with minimal agitation

It also defines what each agitation mode means:

The question is: What is “intermittent agitation”? What is “minimal”? Let’s break this down, because two things jump out once I read these carefully.

1. Constant agitation is actually the least precisely defined of the three. “Fluid inversions and/or rotations, while changing direction” is a description of behavior, not a spec. How fast? How many inversions per minute? The Laboratorist decides. This ambiguity is fine if you’re doing it by hand (you’ll find a rhythm that works), but it means different people on constant agitation can still produce different results. That said, it’s the most efficient mode when you use a rotary agitation machine, which I’ll cover later on.

2. From these 3 agitation suggestions, constant agitation is the only one of the three that has a clean mechanical definition. The tank moves continuously for the full time. No interpretation required, nonstop. The problem is that constant agitation by hand, for three straight minutes, is tedious and sometimes inconsistent. Nobody inverts a tank perfectly evenly for three minutes. Your arm gets tired, your rhythm drifts, and you’ve introduced variance you can’t measure. Not to mention the fear by bromide drag lines.

The intermittent and minimal specs exist, but they demand manual timing. “30 seconds constant, then 10 seconds every minute” sounds simple, but it’s not mechanically accurate. The spec exists; hitting it reliably by hand, roll after roll, is another matter.

That’s why...

A rotary film processor REALLY helps

A rotary processor puts the tank on its side and rotates it continuously. Constant agitation becomes automatic. Same rpm, same direction cycle, every time. You’ve locked the agitation variable. No more guessing what “minimal” means because you’re not using minimal anymore.

Pair that with temperature monitoring and you’ve handled both of Df96’s variables adding complexity. The chemistry stays at spec by the water circulator, and the agitation stops being a source of variance with the rotary processor.

I use the AGO Film Processor from Vintage Visual. It’s a compact rotary unit that fits any Paterson tank, rotates the tank at a set RPM, and reads chemistry temperature through a probe. If the temperature drifts during the run, it stretches or shortens the time to compensate (well, that might not matter for Df96, so I’d better keep it consistent...), For Df96 in particular, this removes the two things that make the monobath inconsistent. JOBO’s rotary systems (the CPP and CPE lines) do a similar job, and there are a few other rotary options if you hunt around. The category is the recommendation. The AGO happens to be my pick because it’s small, quiet, it works with tanks I already own, and their customer support are simply stellar.

By the way, the Df96 manual also states that processing time should never exceed 8 minutes. That’s a hard stop, the chemistry is considered exhausted past that point. And since higher agitation means shorter times, constant agitation takes the longest to reach that ceiling. In practice, a fresh bottle of Df96 gets you 20 rolls at constant agitation, 16 at intermittent, and only 8 at minimal. That’s another strong argument for constant agitation, more negatives per bottle.

A CameraClara cheatsheet for Df96 on a rotary processor (AGO, Jobo, etc.)

After researching this for a while, I put together a table. I laminated it and keep near my sink in at RafLabs. Base times at 80°F/27°C constant agitation with the AGO, which also increase shelf-life), with the +15 second reuse compensation CineStill specifies, plus push columns for +1 and +2. I am making this available for you, at no cost!

The identical time columns are the whole point. As we now know, with Df96, pushing is done by raising temperature, not extending time. The time value is a minimum for self-completion, as I said, a safety checkpoint. Temperature is what changes the development. I wanted the time repeated across columns as a visual reminder on purpose.

Simple where it counts, complex where it matters. Do I recommend it?

Df96 is absolutely worth using. The chemistry simplicity is real, and a rotary processor with temperature awareness takes care of the rest. But it’s honest to say the monobath isn’t the “pour and forget” product the bottle suggests. It’s a fast, flexible process that trades chemistry complexity for process control. If you understand that trade, you’ll get great negatives. If you don’t, you’ll wonder why your rolls look inconsistent and blame the film.

To summarize, the monobath is simple at one point and complex at another. Knowing which is which is most of the battle. Here’s a result, with a well-deserved zoom for you to observe the grain structure of an ISO 400.

Additional links

CineStill Df96 Processing Instructions (a.k.a. manual)

Cinestill Resources Page

Additional notes

1. For readers in tropical or very cold climates: if your ambient room temperature is already past 82°F or below 65°F, passive temperature control won’t be enough. You’ll need to actively cool or warm the chemistry before pouring. A friend of mine in Manaus, Brazil (), has to ice-bath chemicals during the Summer because his kitchen sits at 35°C year-round. This is worth knowing before you commit, especially if you’re using chemicals that rely on temperature, like the Df96.

2. Worth noticing that everything I wrote here is wrote in the bottle and in the manuals. I am just sharing my discovery and points of attention you should have when using this fantastic chemical to develop your own rolls.

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Find the full episode in this post’s header. Below, some highlights worth reading even if you watch the whole thing, especially if you are curious to learn if food photographers eat the dishes after photographing (sorry for the clickbait, I have to do it to survive 😂).

Shooting for a living

Max photographs food on location with one light during operating hours. Cheese goes cold, meat loses its shine, soups stop steaming. He shoots fast. Every time, someone asks who’s eating all the food. “I am,” he says, staring at 15 dishes.

I asked if clients request artistic direction. His method: say “I got it” and ignore it.

Sensors, shutters, and fake blur

He rented the Sony A9 III and showed why global shutters matter. A drone propeller at 1/8000s looks banana-shaped on a regular sensor. On the A9 III, perfectly straight. Every pixel reads at the same instant.

The fake depth of field debate came up. Software blur still can’t handle hair, glasses, or the gradual falloff from sharp to blurry. A decade of “it’s just a matter of time.” We’re still waiting.

Film, cameras, and strong opinions

I shared my Japan mistake: 20 rolls of CineStill 800T, shot temples and snow in Sapporo. Cold and flat. There’s a meme: “If NASA used CineStill 800T,” and there’s a gas station on the moon. Because that’s what we do.

Max said, “Can I say something controversial?” and dropped: “I’m not a fan of halation.” Bold move. Let’s all now altogether cancel him on the Internet. 😅

Near the end he casually pulled out a Leica IIIC from 1941. Delivered to the Luftwaffe. 85 years old. It works.

We want to do more of these. Go subscribe to Max Adams on YouTube. Almost 80K subscribers and he still responds to everyone.

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There’s this idea that cropping is cheating. That a “real photographer” gets it right in camera, every time. Framing well matters, yes. But the best photo in the world is useless if you didn’t take it because you were worrying about perfect composition in the moment.

Bresson talked about the decisive moment, but he spent hours in the darkroom with his printer adjusting the frame. The mythology of the perfect, untouched capture is exactly that.

Medium format

Yesterday I went out shooting in Manhattan with my friend Brian. I had a medium format camera and I came home with frames that looked average at full width and fantastic once I cropped them to what I actually wanted. Like finding a gemstone inside rough rock. The information was always there. I just needed to remove what didn’t belong.

Panoramas too. Crop a single 100 MP frame into a wide aspect ratio and you still have enough resolution for a large print. No stitching, no overlapping frames, no tripod. Just one shot and a crop.

For this set I processed everything through Dehancer on desktop with a Portra 800 emulation. I wanted warmth and grain without shooting actual film, and Dehancer gets closer to real stock behavior than anything else I’ve tried.

These cameras are pricey and not everyone can justify the investment. But the lesson applies at any resolution: don’t be afraid to crop. The shot you recompose in post is better than the shot you never took because the framing wasn’t perfect.