Tokyo 14 - CineStill 800T
Resuming Japan roll dumps, EXIF data on analog photography, my ShotOn tool, and an ultmost nerd combination of film photography, and software development.
If you know me personally, you know I work with IT, and I am savvy about coding, databases, security, SysOps, DevOps, distributed systems, and now AI.
Recently, I’ve been working on a personal project to add film borders to my photography, it’s a project called ShotOn, a powerful and customizable tool to add a border with the predominant color of the image, and on the bottom of that border, provide information about the shot. It works both with digital and analog, and I am overdue for a substack post to write about it. Coming soon, I promise! ✍🏻
One day I plan turning ShotOn into a web application so everybody can use it. For now, it works on my command line, and the invocation is like this:
This is what it looks like. Lots of yellow? That weights in the predominant color calculation, and bam, look at that presentation, with exposure info!
There’s something uniquely special about seeing exposure data on analog shots. In this case, it was a 1/75, which is possible because the M7 uses an electronic shutter with the ability of exposing in between the traditional 1/60 and 1/125, when used in Auto mode. That feature is what makes the M7 is the best of the analog Leicas, in my humble opinion.
Also, when calculating the predominant color of the image, my software disregards the photogram borders (film sprockets), to avoid having color contamination, and also make use of a readable contrast ratio to detect if it should use light or dark text accordint to the calculated background color, so the text always look good, meaning the ones who need sunglasses are the just the photographed ones!
Alright, enough nerd talk, let’s go to the photo dump, and main post’s subject. This is the second-to-last 35mm roll I shot in Tokyo, the medium format ones are coming next (can’t wait to have the border with the Mamiya 7ii within).
On the day after, or April 24th, 2025, right here (35°41'12.0"N 139°42'21.0"E). Ah, yes, you must be asking: but where do these EXIF information come from? And the location? Continue reading. Actually, I think this is a nice time to subscribe, right? Like, look at the amount of cool stuff you’re getting for free! 💖
Yeah, the CineStill 800T wasn’t in its natural habitat. I need to buy a yellow filter to put in front of it in order to make beautiful days and landscapes suck less.
So, the EXIF in film photography come from an App that I am using. It’s a simple mobile app that I have to use for every single shot I do. Sometimes I just copy the previous shot, and the exposure information is not 100% acurate, except when I am doing medium format, for these, I indeed input shutter speed and aperture because each medium format shot is a more special shot. Also, a post about the EXIF thing is coming soon, I promise! ✍🏻
Well, nothing like going down a subway can’t do for the 800T!
That’s the end of the Tokyo roll 14 from my Japan trip in April, I hope you like it✌️. Keep film photography nice, shiny, and sparkly! ✨
I’ve been curious how you have all that information for your film shots! That’s some really nice automation to keep you from having to add it to every shot. Work smarter not harder!
Wonderful stuff, Raf! The images are great (I’ve got a lot of similar shots incoming in my Japan posts) and that border system is slick as hell. I was wondering for a while now how you were doing that, the font you used is perfect too, so clean. Will you include the ability to pick from system fonts in the web app?