The Cinematic Notebook
The craft behind our portraiture and film development.
How This Notebook Connects to Film Photography and Film Development
Every article in this archive reflects the full analogue workflow used by Liquid Light Whisperer and Liquid Light Lab — from motivated lighting and optical rendering through to controlled development and high-dynamic-range scanning. The same discipline documented here is applied to commissioned portrait work and to every roll processed in the lab.
Voigtländer Nokton 50 mm f/1.1 Review: Cinematic Rendering on Film for Portraits, Weddings, and Events
The Voigtländer Nokton 50 mm f/1.1 in M-mount is one of the few modern lenses built with an analogue-era expressive mindset. It is a tool designed to build atmosphere, depth, and tonal weight on film. In portrait sessions, weddings, and low-light events, it behaves with the authority needed for authored image-making. Used on the Leica M3 Double-Stroke as a mechanical work surface, the lens becomes a precise instrument for drawing scenes with intention and harnessing motivational light—whether shaped by controlled artificial lighting, directional window light, or mixed sources structured for coherence.
Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5 (1939) — The Lens That Drew Light Before Colour
The 50mm f/1.5 Zeiss Sonnar from 1939 is one of the great optical designs of the last century. It belongs to an age before coating, before marketing language replaced observation. It was built to interpret light, not to control it. Mine is one of the last pre-war uncoated examples, mounted on a Contax IIa body from the early 1950s — the bridge between the pre-war world and the modern one.
