Nikon F100 with Cinestill 400D

This roll had been in the camera since around Christmastime 2025 and I only recently got around to developing it: I’m moving house and I’ve had stuff on and other excuses. I do have a habit of forgetting that I have a roll in a camera if that camera is not where I’m spending most of my time: the F100 was sat on a chest at the foot of a bed in the house I’m moving into and I hadn’t been there much for a while. I’d gotten distracted by the Contax G2 arriving.

I think finding an AF Fisheye-Nikkor 16mm f/2.8D* for a ridiculously generous price was enough to make me think ‘oh yeah, I do have an F-mount camera at home after all’ and inspire me to finish the roll. I won’t say that there was gold on the second half of the roll that I used the fisheye with: fisheye has a reputation as something a little gimmicky for a reason. The extremeness of the perspective does not lend itself to general photography and it was definitely a learning curve to even get an idea of what might work.

Even though I’ve lived in the city for over a decade, I’d never gone down onto the ‘beaches’ that form along the Thames in the city: some sun and a lack of will to complete my walking commute was enough to make me think “maybe I should” one morning. I was rewarded with this view. Yes, a lot of the frame is black and, yes, the warping of the perspective offered by the fisheye perspective doesn’t really add anything to the composition, but I like the centrality of the Cheesegrater and the contrast of the frame in general.

I spend too much time around the Barbican, probably. I imagine the residents hate people like me: I recall a resident telling me that it often feels like they live in a zoo with the amount of photography that goes on around what is their home. Such is the burden of owning iconic multi-million pound property in the centre of London, I suppose: I can’t see I’m too sympathetic. As an avowed lover of the halation that is emblematic of Cinestill et al’s remjet-less respooled Kodak cinema film, I love what the brightness of the Barbican sign here does: the light reflected back through the film and exposed as right adds a nice splash of colour to what is otherwise a relatively monotone frame.

I feel like any photographer in London ends up with some variant of this shot using Millennium Bridge’s view over the river to St. Paul’s. I hate the cliché, but I thought that the fisheye perspective might add to it,. I think it did. Well, took away: there’s something missing, and it’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, and we end up with far more focus on just the bridge and its people. My habit for being unable to keep a straight horizon line reared its head here and I’ve done my best to correct it, but I feel like the fisheye accentuates even the most minor tilt.

Triptych Bankside is an interesting set of buildings, and the stretching that is the hallmark of the fisheye does a good job of highlighting the curves that the building has as well as making the framing of the canopy even more extreme. It was an incredibly bright day when this was taken and the halation is in full force, giving a red rim to areas of contrast that, again, is to my taste. I like when the medium is opinionated, and these films into bright light certainly are that.

This is a chair and a makeshift desk that has been in the house since it was bought: a leftover from the previous occupiers that has often made me think of the honour it is to inhabit places others have and to make use of spaces that are so storied outside of my engagement with them. The light from this window, the reddishness of the chair itself and the film’s natural tendency to red highlights makes this for me.

They do an eighteen inch pizza at Yard Sale that is my favourite thing to eat. I just like the sign.

*look, I know, I’m linking to a Ken Rockwell page and he is who he is, but I find it funny and as a repository for information abut Nikon stuff, it’s not like there’s a resource online that holds a candle to dearest Ken