Gas Station, as shot | iPhone 7 using the Lightroom camera
Gas Station, after editing | iPhone 7 using the Lightroom camera
I follow a few analog film stock hashtags on Instagram, and images of gas stations at night come up very often, particularly if the film is CineStill 800T. The color temperature of CineStill 800T is such that in images taken with it, the light appears very blue or green. On the one hand, it’s gotten to the point that I see this as a pretty well-worn cliche. Does Instagram truly need one more blue/green gas station at night? (search Instagram for it; you will indeed find many.)
On the other, I can see some appeal here.
An unedited smartphone image of a gas station might look pretty close to the way it actually appears to the eye. I’d qualify this by saying that it’s not always the case, and how the image appears is very much mediated by programming decisions in the camera software. Still— I’d say it’s at the very least closer to my eyes as the way it actually is than what usually appears in the CineStill 800T shots.
But the Cinestill 800T ones *look* more real or more cinematic (resonating with the Cinestill brand here) in part because they look like what a gas station in the middle of the night is supposed to feel like.
Without specific evidence (but with a reasonable amount of confidence), I’d say that movies and TV shows influence the way we expect things to look like. The scenes from movies and TV shows that we see at gas stations aren’t usually happy go lucky affairs (except maybe for in Zoolander, before the freak gasoline fight accident). Gas station scenes, particularly at night, tend to be ominous, foreboding, and creepy, and that’s the sort of feeling that blue/green (particularly green) light lends itself towards.
So, maybe green gas stations at night have something going for them after all.
This is my go at it, not with CineStill 800T but with editing to try and roughly approximate it. I took an image using Adobe LightRoom on my iPhone 7. The first version shown here is cropped, but there are no other edits. I’ve fussed with the second version to try to expose more in the shadows and bring down the highlights, but also to add some grain and change colors to that blue/green look.