Without wanting to overwhelm you, these are two blog posts in one: football and technology. Of course it's not about FC St. Pauli... At the beginning of the month there was a charity tournament in Berlin for the benefit of Viva con Agua instead of. So actually more for fountains in Uganda and that worked out quite well: around €40000 was raised and there are already clean drinking water for several hundred people in Uganda. Cool thing! I liked getting up early and going to bed late. At least I had a first class chauffeur: dear Nico, thank you very much for this fantastic service!
Viva con Agua Football Cup
After the last event of this kind Go-karting in a football stadium was popular, this time there was football on a go-kart track - no, not quite, but it was indoors. Of course, many musicians and footballers took part again, because without players an event like this is only half as nice. (Check out my Instagram account in the next few days, there are a few quick analogue portraits of some of the participants: they are the pictures on black.) In 6-minute games it was intense and at the end of many battles the Sportfreunde Stiller won. It's understandable given the name.
So much for the sporty, now comes the gentle transition to the technical. Have you ever taken photos in a modern indoor football thing? The light is simply cruel, as it always is when something is supposed to look stylish and yet it's just concrete. In any case, I quickly put my Fuji XT-2 aside, otherwise I would still be waiting for the autofocus to hit something. I have the sports photos with him Noctilux taken with the aperture wide open and still have to use ISO3200. (For the nerds among us: i.e. even with a cheap f1.4 lens, ISO8000 would have been the order of the day. The problem was that the game was so fast that I had to take photos with an exposure time of 1/250s and even here I had to get slight motion blur 50mm limits the ability to take photos quite a bit, but I can wait. And with this light, the gate on the other side is of no interest anyway...
But that's just how it is with event photography: nobody is interested in the photographer's problems. "Get your things done" is the motto.
So, now let's take pictures and then things get really nerdy: I'll explain to you what all this has to do with the title of this post.
Classic ECN-2 Lightroom Preset
So, now to the real technical part: André Duhme once again made sure that I turned on Lightroom Classic CC (what a name, Adobe). André had a successful and beautiful adaptation of it some time ago Kodachrome for Lightroom published. This time he did a really hard job and created the Cinestill for Lightroom and as a Camera RAW preset. It's actually a miracle that we photographers can use Cinestill in real life - i.e. as film. Actually, this is a movie and has to be developed differently somehow. (I'm not that kind of nerd either.) I'm particularly interested in the sensitive 800T film, which - as its name suggests - shows its strengths at ISO800 and with tungsten light (i.e. artificial). I even took part in the Kickstarter project to get the first rolls of the film for medium format cameras. The 120 rolls have been sitting in the fridge for almost a year now, waiting to be put to good use. André's request that I take a look at his presets for free (thanks for that) came at just the right time. And of course the pictures from the event shown above fit in perfectly. Everything is edited with André Duhme's 800T preset for Lightroom. Fast and effective.
You can use the presets for your images in an excellent structure. Right from the start it works much more smoothly than with André's first work. Compliments, he really listened and implemented the user reports well. And as you can see from the examples above, the 800T is a stylish way to edit your images - especially when artificial light is at stake.
For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the Cinestill preset can also be used for daylight. There is also an ISO50 daylight version for this originally analogue film material. And the same is true for the work officially called "Classic ECN-2 Lightroom Preset". It is called 50D and works particularly well for images with a lot of light - and that is exactly where my problem with the test began: I couldn't find any suitable RAWs. 50D is probably not for Hamburgers...
As a conclusion for this preset, I can say that the Classic ECN-2 Lightroom preset is worth it just for the 800T preset. I don't know of any other way to get the Cinestill film digitally on its files: neither 800T nor 50D. And André really put a lot of work and precision into these presets. On his Information page about these presets you can compare digital and analog images and see for yourself how accurate they are. The application is then really easy and well thought out. Really good!
So, if you are a Lightroom user: get the “Classic ECN-2 Lightroom Preset”!
Stefan, I know that light there... It's fantastic what you did there and hats off to you for simply having the balls and the self-confidence to just pick up the Leica and the lens. It's nice how you always motivate me to just give it a try myself.
Oh and… Nice preset. 🙂
Oh, you are my motivator when looking for a motif...
Hey Stefan, if I hadn't installed André's presets yesterday, I would have snapped them up after seeing your pictures. Very nice. Nerd info: The original Kodak film has a "Remjet layer". Put simply, this layer is there to prevent the film from burning in the camera at 24 frames per second. A kind of protective layer. This would render the chemical bath in the C-41 process unusable. Some nerds buy the Vision T anyway and "wash" it. The lack of a protective layer on the Cinestill causes the slightly bizarre red halos under lamps.
Samma, since when are 1.4 lenses actually cheap? 😉 Kind regards
Thanks for the nerd info!
You, and a few others, have also recently changed my perspective on photography. Courage for simplicity!
Great cinema, I like it!
Fantastic report. Wonderfully captured. Thank you for showing me. Always a pleasure.
gruß
Markus
Thank you very much Stefan! Best route for the 800T!