Category Archives: professional use

Family Portraits on Film

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I thought I’d show some of my recent back-to-film portrait shoots on the blog, with some quick notes on how it’s been going.

My goal is to eliminate digital completely from most of my portrait shoots, with the exception of using a dSLR to ‘chimp’ my lighting, since I use a lot of strobe. As an intermediate step though, I’ve been shooting the ‘posed’ portraits on medium format film, and using my dSLR to capture the candids (e.g. kids running around like monkeys after I told them they didn’t have to sit still anymore). I recently did a shoot where I captured the candids on 35mm film, but I have not gotten those back from the lab yet.

My first official “without a net”, no-digital shoot was a family affair. By that I mean my wife’s cousins from one branch of her family. A large group of us were camping at the beach a few months ago, and I was asked to shoot some casual group shots while I was there. I had previously vowed to shoot only film while on vacation, so when asked, I decided I wasn’t going to bring a dSLR just for this group shot. Instead I simply shot it on the Bronica ETR-s, which I had along with me anyway.

The film is Fuji Pro 160S on 220 format film. I exposed for their faces using an incident light meter. I then set up a strobe (Nikon SB-28) at camera position, on auto and underexposing a stop, for fill. No chimping and I don’t think I even brought a strobe meter. The ambient was doing the heavy lifting, and the strobe was just to fill the shadows a little bit.

Ok time to get a little more serious about film. Below you see some long-time clients of mine. Ironically the last time I shot them, I also used a mix of film and digital then as well! It’s been a few years, and they managed to (just barely) skip my all-digital period. Below I’m shooting on Kodak Ektar 100, probably f/8 or so. For this shoot, I had a flash meter as well as ambient. So I first picked an aperture that a) I knew my strobe could expose properly for, given the distance to the subjects, b) would not yield a shutter speed that was too slow to prevent subject blurring, and c) would give me the depth of field I needed to have my subjects in focus. I then set my main strobe (Metz Mecablitz 60 in 43″ shoot-through umbrella) to expose properly for that aperture. I don’t recall if I used a fill light or not, but I would have set that about 1 stop down. And then I picked a shutter speed that underexposed the ambient…by a stop? More? I don’t remember now. You can see how dark the distant trees are though, which is probably a stop underexposed.

Unfortunately, when I switched backs for a new roll of film on my Bronica, something went wrong. The camera felt like it was advancing the film, but the counter wasn’t moving. So I quickly baled on the Bronica and switched to digital, not missing a beat. The film images are by far the best ones from the shoot though, and I wish I’d had another roll of film. That’s right, I showed up with two film backs and only two rolls of film…hey I’m still working out the procedural kinks in this process!

Fresh from my scare with the Bronica film back, and not sure what the problem was, I decided to use my Yashica-Mat twin lens reflex camera for another repeat client. Who, as it happens, also had their first shoot done as a mix of film and digital. This was also shot on Ektar. I had a major panic moment on the way home, when I discovered the easily-moved flash sync switch was on “M” rather than “X”. Without going into the technical details at the moment, if I’d shot with it set to “M”, all my exposures would have missed the flash timing, even though the flash would have appeared to behave normally. I would have ended up with silhouettes instead of nicely exposed people. I pestered the lab to report back on the negatives, and fortunately the switch must have shifted after the shoot.

I did however start hankering for faster film. ISO 100 film means I’m shooting at f/8 a lot of the time, at least for full-body shots (distance of the flash reduces the power, and therefore I need a wider aperture). But f/8 didn’t give me the depth of field in medium format that I needed for groups of people. F/16 was more like what I needed, which meant that—with the current strobe power I have—I needed to shoot at ISO 400. So where the heck was that new Kodak 400 Portra film?? I need it!!

Next we come to a shoot on my Mamiya RB67. 6×7 medium format needs even more depth of field than 645 like the Bronica…the format is bigger, so relative DOF is smaller compared to smaller film formats. The images below are shot using the old Portra 400 NC, and I exposed it at ISO 200 for better scanning. That gave me one more stop’s worth of depth of field, compared to Ektar. I really like the quality of these images…I don’t know whether it’s the camera, the film, the light or the people. Lighting: Metz to the right in an umbrella as main light, fill flash at camera position (Nikon SB-28), and sun to camera left, behind the subjects. It helps that we had a really nice day too!

So there are more family portrait images coming, including some shot on the elusive New Portra 400 (at ISO 400, natch!). It’s my busy season in the lead up to the holidays, and I’m burning through film. You can see more of my family portrait photography here.

Celeb Shoot: Mackenzie Rosman on film

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A few months ago I had the opportunity to shoot Mackenzie Rosman for Zooey Magazine. Mackenzie is most known for her long-running role as “Ruthie” on the TV show Seventh Heaven. She’s all grown up now, and we spent the day shooting at a wonderful bed and breakfast in South Pasadena, called the Arroyo Vista Inn. I’ve detailed the shoot on my other site, Fashion+Light, but I wanted to discuss the film aspects of this shoot here.

I used both film and digital cameras on this shoot. Which turned out to be a really good thing, because I had some problems with many of the film images! If I’d shot primarily on film, I would have been, well…screwed.

I chose my Bronica EC for this shoot for the larger negative, and more a trivial reason: the cable release works on it. My other medium format system camera is a Bronica ETR-s, and the cable release is broken on that. I know, I should just replace the body, and I will eventually. While I don’t have as much experience with this camera as I do, for example, with my Bronica ETR-s, I had used it often enough that I didn’t think twice about my choice. However my style of shooting that day happened to coincide with the weak spot of the camera: mirror slap.

I had discussed the look with the editor of the magazine. She wanted a natural light look, not too ‘lit’, not too over-produced. The B&B had some nice windows, and I shot a few of the images with just available light and reflectors. However to get the proper exposure (Fuji Pro 160S film), my shutter speeds were in the 1/8 to 1/30 s range…yeah, you see where I’m going with this, right?

Mirror slap occurs when the mirror of an SLR camera vibrates the body as it moves. At fast shutter speeds, this isn’t a problem because the shutter moves so fast that the vibration effect doesn’t come into play. And at very long shutter speeds (1 second, for example), the portion of the exposure time that experiences vibration is very small, and so doesn’t have an effect on the sharpness of the image either. But there is a “sweet spot” (sour spot?) where the vibration can be a real problem. Turns out that’s the shutter speed range where I was shooting. And because I was under pressure and didn’t want to slow things down too much, I wasn’t using the “mirror raise” lever on the camera, which pulls the mirror out of the way manually. That lever is designed to reduce or eliminate mirror slap…but I wasn’t using it, because I’d never had a problem before. Duh.

So most of the images are blurry, and were unusable. Interestingly, the only ones that were sharp – even at the 1/15th shutter speeds – were ones where the tripod was on a wood floor. All the other shots were taken on carpet. The carpet seems to have accentuated the mirror slap. And no I don’t think it was the strobe freezing the action, because the ambient light is quite significant in these images.

This is my favorite image from the shoot though, and I don’t think it’s simply because I shot it on film. I wanted the background to blow out, and I wanted the ambient window light to play a significant role. The details are fuzzy now (no pun intended), but I think I took an incident meter reading from where her face is, and then dialed in an exposure one stop down. This gave plenty of detail in the room, while ensuring the scene through the window mostly blew out to white. That would give me the “sun streaming through the window” look, even though the sun happened to be on the other side of the house. The sky light coming through the window also acts as a soft rim light, giving an edge to her hair that separates it from the leaves in the background. I set up an Alien Bees 1600 and 40″ octabox outside the house, firing through the window to camera left (this is in the corner of the Inn’s front room) for the key light. So I guess technically it is window light, but of the momentary kind. I also set up a reflector camera-right, to fill the shadows on Mackenzie a little more.

I’ve since sold my Bronica EC. Not because it let me down on this shoot, but because I needed to finance the recent purchase of a Mamiya RB67 system, and felt that my Bronica ETR-s system was the more useful of the Bronicas to keep. With my recent switch to film for client work (or at least, a lot more of it), you can expect to see more than just “for fun” shots in this blog in the future.

Fashion Shoot on Film

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A couple of months ago I did a fashion editorial shoot for LA2DAY.com, which you can see in its entirety here (link). It was primarily shot on digital, but I really wanted to shoot some film as well. And to make things challenging—as if planning and executing a fashion editorial shoot wasn’t challenging enough!—I decided to use my “lucky camera”. And by that I mean my Zeiss Ikon Nettar medium format (6×6) folding camera. It’s manual everything, and is ‘zone focus’. That means I guess the distance to the subject, and then adjust the focus ring accordingly. No rangefinder, just dialing it in. I shot two rolls of 120 film: one roll was Kodak Porta 160 NC (old formulation), and the other was ‘new’ Porta 160 NC.

I’m pretty bad at guessing distance though, so I brought along a tape measure to be sure! You can see this in use in the last shot of this post, which was taken by my assistant Desirée Durang. I’m quite sure this is the first time I’ve never handed a model one end of a tape measure and said “now hold this to your nose”.

The image below was taken in the same spot, and was the one film image to make it into the shoot. But given that I took about 400 digital images and only 24 film images, that seems like a good hit ratio for film. Many of the film images were real contenders though (it was, after all, my lucky camera). So I thought I’d share those with you.

The one below was shot with full-blast sunlight, albeit in late afternoon when the sun was at a friendly angle. No fill, and my shadow is intentionally in the shot.

Below you see the first location of the day, when the sun is still high in the sky. We picked a tree to shoot under, and I believe there is a fill card to camera-left, providing most of the light on Kendall’s face.

This image below, like the lead image, was shot with off-camera strobe. Yes even though the Nettar is ancient, with only a few shutter speeds and apertures, it fully syncs with flash (and it’s a leaf shutter, so it syncs at all speeds!). I ‘chimped’ the look with my dSLR first, then ‘aped’ (get it?) those settings for the Nettar. My Nettar has a really foggy viewfinder, and it was very difficult to see through when pointing into the sun. In some cases I had to hope her posing was top notch since I couldn’t see it, but Kendall is a professional and nailed it.

The aforementioned tape-measure shot, below.