Night-time Street Photography #3 - CineBloom Lens Filter

Every shot a still frame from a movie.

That's what I tried going for in this series of pictures. I finally got my goddamn lens filter and cutting straight to it, I love it. That red finish, it looks hella good on the lens. Got the 10% strength, 58mm size to make sure I can use it on all my lens currently with step up rings.

Build quality, finishing and the case, everything is top notch, not unexpected though. Would be a shame if this wasn't the case, with that price tag. Honestly, not as much as I thought they were going for.

Shipping took around 3 weeks even though they claim "orders over $35... delivered within 2-3 days for 90% on average". It was a back-order though, and maybe the pandemic affected international shipping, who knows? I digress.

In any case, you can cop 'em, 10% or 20% strength, in multiple sizes, from their store right here.

Took my X-700, waited till the sun set and went out shooting illuminated places and signs all across Chinatown to Tanjong Pagar. With Chinese New Year around the corner, the whole place was perfect to test out this lens filter. (Although I realised all my examples below didn't include any of the festive stuff lol)

Minolta X700 + CineBloom 10% | Portra 400

I love how the colours came out, how the lights have that extra shimmer. It's a must to shoot red neon lights with it, the red glow fills almost all the highlights. Every shot does look like a still from a movie, to me anyway. I have yet to try this lens in daylight but I'm not really a fan of using soft lens in the day. I feel like this filter will be a must have for night shoots from now on. If only we'd have the Ramadan bazaar this year, that would've been a great time to use this.

The soft effect is definitely stronger than my cheap soft lens filter I wrote about previously. My initial train of thought was that if this filter performs as well as the cheaper one, I'd just sell it and use that. Now that I've used it, it's a pretty big difference. That cheap one is pretty good, don't get me wrong. This one is just... better, way better. So, no, I'm keeping it, thank you very much.