I had a brief holiday in Seoul, South Korea in October 2022 and decided to make the most of a free morning by shooting some Kodak Vision3 500T motion picture film stock around Ihwa Mural village and the ancient city wall that skirts side of Mt Naksa.

Those of you  pockets and a love of photographing petrol stations at night will know this film as Cinestill 800T.

But 500T is the original, the wellspring from which Cinestill was born, complete with the remjet layer designed to provide lubrication as it’s fed through a movie camera as well as antihalation, antistatic,  and scratch protection.

It’s also known to foul up automatic film processors so you don’t try to get this stuff developed at the local chemist, you have been warned

If you’ve ever shot Cinestill 800T you’ll be familiar with the qualities of this film – high speed, sharp, low grain but because they remove the remjet layer before you shoot it, you get this love ’em or hate ’em red blooming halations in highlights of the image.

It’s a look. A pretty well documented look by anyone who loves hanging out around petrol stations at night. It’s a bit like how dressing up as a squid game guard for halloween is a look – kinda cool when you see it for the first time but then it just gets old and cheap really quickly.

MY motivation wasn’t to lurk in neon shadows. It was simply to save money. My motivation LOTS of things in life is simply to save money but that’s an article for another time. I guess the question for me was…  in this dystopian nightmare of film shortages and exorbitant prices, where people are literally killing each other on the streets for a roll of Kodak Colorplus… well ok, figuratively not literally – it’s not Kodak Portra 800. But that’s the question, isn’t it! is Vision3 500T a viable alternative?  Will I get Portra in plain packaging or a steaming membrane of slime coated celluloid with all the quality and resolution of 1970s vhs porn pic that’s been duplicated too many times? Yes, I was 16 in 1984.

It was time to find out.

I grabbed my Nikon FE film SLR and my Nikkor 35-200mm manual focus lens and headed out on the South Korean Subway to Ihwa Mural village – just one change and a few stops from where I was staying in Myeongdong but a place with a very different vibe. Nestled on the side of Mt Naksa, it’s a fairly quiet residential area, skirted by the ancient walls of the city and now fairly well known for its street art, which was painted as part of an urban renewal project in the early 2000s, though some of them have been painted back over again because the locals didn’t like the influx of tourists who descended on the community. Or let’s face it, wannabe film photography YouTUBERS.

First conclusion, it wasn’t easy walking all the way up that hill. More importantly, though, what about Kodak Vision3 500T??

I like it! I’d already seen a lot of information about it. It’s known for producing good, fairly neutral looking colours, with acceptable grain, plenty of detail without being overly sharp and a fair amount of exposure latitude.

I shot it at the box speed of ISO 500 and developed it using Cinestill CS41 2 bath kit, which is a standard C41 colour negative process. Technically that’s cross processing it – I could have used the more rarified ECN2, which is what the film was designed for.

Developing was pretty simple really. Other than the standard developer and blix, you do need to do an initial phase in the prewash where you add a table spoon of sodium bicarbonate and agitate it for a minute or two. What comes out is pretty gruesome and I can see why labs won’t touch the stuff.

At the end of the process, though, the negatives looked good. I did give it a final wipe on the non-emulsion side and was probably a bit heavy handed. I got a few more black holes and smudges on my scans where the emulsion might have been a bit abused. I promise I’ll be more gentle next time Mr Kodak.

Some people have said that to get the best out of it, you should really dunk it in the right soup but I’ve seen lots of examples of ECN2 processed Vision3 and they haven’t really impressed me.

You often see shots that are bit muddy and with a tendency to lean into teal. It may be more ‘cinematic’ but that is a very loaded term, and you don’t want every photo to look like The Matrix. C41 gave a fairly natural colour palate. Remember, too, that this is tungsten film so there is no natural baseline to work from when you’re scanning photos shot in daylight.

I did struggle a bit with choosing the white balance and sometimes small changes seemed to throw off the colour of sky or earth tones. That said, the film good exposure latitude. You can really see the texture in the clouds on what was a pretty grey day and there was plenty of detail in shadows without it being grainy. I felt it could be tamed to a few different looks.

All of this suggests it could be quite a versatile film. Most of the photos below were urban landscapes but it works fine too with portraits. Skin tones are rendered nicely. I shot a second roll the following day and the colours seemed quite true to life.

At about AU$17 a respooled roll at the time of writing, its price sits somewhere between my usual Kodak Colorplus and more ‘professional’ film such as Portra. You have to ask yourself if it’s worth the minor extra effort in processing. However, colour film is not just getting expensive, it’s getting harder to find, so if you can’t find your favourite film, Kodak Vision3 500T is a great alternative.