A Little Trip to Borough Market with a Contax G2 – Part 2 – dubblefilm Cinema Film – By Joe Curzon

Following on from part 1 of my trip to Borough Market, this forms the second part of the article this time around with of dubblefilm Cinema Film.

After using a whole roll of Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow, I packed my bag with various other film. I also had a roll of dubblefilm Cinema Film and keen to try it. It’s ISO 800 film used in movie cameras, with the remjet layer removed to make it more accessible to 35mm shooters. dubblefilm promises epic colours, insane tones at night, halo effect around bright red lights and a bluish tone in daylight. I know this kind of stock is especially fun with artificial lights. This made December the perfect time to go out and find something sparkly and Borough Market had it’s Christmas lights out on show.

Before getting started, I stopped indoors for a coffee so I could load my camera and get caffeinated.

I found even in the dull December London light the films results are fun. Like other cinefilm it’s particularly sensitive to rendering lights with a bright red aura. In this case I’ve found it renders yellows very pleasingly too, due to it’s blue-ish cast. The film isn’t DX encoded but dubblefilm provide a sticker set to 800 iso if you need it. The Contax G2 will read DX encoding, but it also allows you to manually override it. All the photos here are shot at box speed. I’ve been really satisfied with how these shots have turned out and will certainly use this film again in the future. I’ll also have to hunt down other dubblefilm stocks! Perhaps next time I’ll use their 120 film in a medium format camera.

When I normally shoot I look for a good subject to snap. With black and white additionally I’ll consider shadows, contrast or some interesting texture. I love shooting architecture in black and white as it make you really focus on the shape and details of the buildings. So while shooting Agent Shadow I was thinking what would look interesting and be picked up in the scenes in Borough Market. Then switching to a colour cinema film made me think differently. I’ve got to not just consider the composition but the colours and how films like this really pick up lights, do I always want to capture that red glow? Will it be too distracting? It was a dull winter day in London, so I also had to factor in how grey everything is, so 800 ISO did the trick! At the moment my Contax G2 is my go to 35mm camera, when it auto focuses I know how it’ll behave, what it it’s likely to lock onto. With a moving crowd scene, you’ve got consider where people will be or if you want to switch to manual focus, which isn’t something that’s as smooth as a normal manual focus rangefinder, so I prefer using it on autofocus and factoring in what’s happening. After all if I wanted manual focus I’d use a different camera and this is one of the short comings of the G2. Despite this, it’s still my favourite every day camera.

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