There’s a particular kind of evening that asks for a camera. Not the golden-hour kind everyone chases — the other one, when the sun is long gone and the city switches on its own lights. Oana was up for a walk, I had a Pentax loaded with Cinestill 800, and that was the whole plan.
If you’ve never shot it, Cinestill 800 is motion-picture film in disguise — tungsten-balanced and happiest under artificial light, which is to say happiest at night. Strip away the daylight and it stops apologising. Streetlamps turn warm, shop windows go molten, and around every bright light it blooms that unmistakable red halo. Another film would call that a flaw. Cinestill makes it the whole point.
The camera was a Pentax Z1-P with the FA 43mm Limited screwed on — a quiet, unglamorous pairing that simply gets out of the way. Forty-three millimetres is roughly the focal length your own eye uses; wide open at f/1.9 it pulls a thin slice of the world into focus and lets everything else dissolve into colour. At night, on a fast film, that’s most of the magic done before you’ve even pressed the shutter.
Oana makes the rest of it easy. Some people freeze the moment a lens turns their way; she does the opposite — settles into it, finds the light, gives you a look and then a grin. Honestly, half of these frames were her idea.
So we wandered, and let the city handle the lighting. A takeaway still open near midnight. A game hall buzzing in red. A currency-exchange board glowing like a small sun. You don’t need to set much up when the street is already this generous — you just have to be there, with the right film, and keep your eyes open.
Every so often the red gives way to a pool of cold blue, and the whole mood flips — a bus shelter, a phone screen, the glow of a cash machine. Those in-between colours are half the reason to shoot a night like this in the first place.
And then it’s over, and you wait. That’s the part digital can’t give you: a week or two of not knowing, the roll coming back from the lab, the scans loading in one at a time. Most of a night like this lives or dies in that small suspense — and this one came back glowing.
Thanks, Oana. — Shot on a Pentax Z1-P with the FA 43mm f/1.9 Limited, on Cinestill 800. More of my film work lives on Instagram at @el_marianchi_.