Tag Archives: film

Family Portraits on Film

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.

Shooting with Film Cameras: It's Good For You!

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Long Beach Convention Center, shot with Voigtlander Bessa-R on Ilford Delta 400, then digitally toned with Lightroom.

I like shooting with film for the look it gives, but I also like shooting film for the process itself. And while I shoot primarily using a digital SLR when working for a client, there are reasons I turn to film when either shooting personal projects, or when a client session allows me to slip in a little film. The work-flow of film has some advantages, beyond the look of the images themselves. Here are some of those reasons I like working with film cameras:

• I like that film shooting is a slower process than with digital. Ultimately after a day’s shooting, I end up with roughly the same number of usable images. No matter how many shots I take! Think about it for a moment: you only have so much space on your wall for prints. Your project only requires a certain number of images. You only want to share a select few images with your friends on flickr etc. So whether you shoot three images or 300, you’re only going to use a certain number of those images in the end.

I find that the bigger the negative, the fewer images I shoot, but the better each image is. I can shoot a roll of 35mm and get a couple of images I like. But when I shoot large format 4×5, and make four images, I still get a couple that I like. That’s because I might spend half an hour composing each image and making it perfect, while with 35mm I feel no such need.

Of course large format photography isn’t suitable for certain types of subjects, such as those that move quickly, or situations or lighting that evolve and need to be captured at a particular moment. And 35mm is not suitable for big prints, or images that require tilts and shifts of the lens. Each format has its uses. But the more care you take with your images, the fewer you take. And yet the yield of quality images tends to be about the same.

• I like that film costs me money for each image I make! This is somewhat tied to the “slow down” philosophy discussed above. If my shots cost money, I think about them a little more. If I think about them, I’m less likely to shoot crap. Dividing up my shoots into sets of 24 or 36 (or 12 for that matter) has a strange and somewhat useful effect on my shooting. If I only have 36 chances of a good image, I’m pickier because I might run out of film too early (or be forced to change rolls and miss something while doing so). Conversely, if I’ve got some shots I know are good, and I’ve still got 10 shots left on the roll, sometimes I’ll be motivated to go use up that roll in a way that doesn’t waste it. And sometimes I get happy surprises by doing that (or at least more shots of my kids).

The worst, most shameful thing in the world is wasting the last ten frames of a roll because you can’t be bothered to shoot something. And yes I’ve done it.

• I love not being able to see the image right after I’ve made it! Oh sure, that’s useful in many cases. But it’s also useful to NOT see my images. How so? If I’m viewing every image as it is recorded in the back of the camera, I am constantly switching from reactive to analytical thought. This probably causes brain cancer. And it certainly makes for a distracted photographer. If I can’t instantly see my image, then I just shoot and hope I’ve got my technical details nailed down properly. I move with the situation, explore the composition and the lighting, and wait for those ‘decisive moments’.

I also find that seeing my work at a later date, as a whole in thumbnail or contact sheet format, can actually make me feel better about my work. Let’s say I’m shooting digitally for example, and I’m having a bad day. I shoot, then “chimp” (i.e. look at the screen on the back of the camera), say “oh that’s just crap”, and repeat. By the tenth crappy shot, I’m feeling pretty crappy myself. But when I view an entire film shoot for the first time in Lightroom after scanning all the images, I immediately gravitate to the best images. The rest don’t matter, because I’ve spotted a couple that I really like. For me, those other images I would have called “crap” when viewed singly just don’t matter when viewed all together. It’s a weird psychological game but it’s real, at least for me.

Those are a few reasons I like to shoot film, that have little to do with the actual image quality. I could discuss the ‘look’ of film, or the look of certain cameras or lenses, but that’s a post for a different day. From a work-flow perspective, film offers a different—not better or worse, just different—process. This can enhance your ways of shooting, not just the way your images look.

Camera Profile: Olympus-35 ECR

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Manufacturer: Olympus
Model: Olympus-35 ECR
Film: 35mm
Type: rangefinder
Lens: 42mm f/2.8 E. Zuiko lens, aperture range f/3.5 to f/13 (yes, f/13 says the manual. Perhaps they were all out of f/16 that day?). Minimum focus distance is .9 m/3 ft. 43mm filer thread.
Shutter: Seiko ESF shutter, shutter speeds 4 s – 1/800 s. Exposure and aperture settings are fully automatic, no manual control.
ASA settings: 25-800
Batteries: 2 x PX640 (mercury batteries, no longer available).
Front-of-lens metering

Features:
Hot shoe
PC sync socket
For flash photography, guide number of flash is set on a ring, and then aperture is adjusted based on the focal distance setting.
Shutter lock on front of the camera, to prevent accidental exposure.
Slow shutter speed LED on top and in viewfinder.
Film advance is with a thumb wheel.

This camera is smaller than the Minolta Hi-Matic F, and one of the smallest rangefinders ever made. It’s a really cute camera! I’ve got it next to a Yashica Electr-35 below, so you can get a sense of the size. Unfortunately, the full-auto aspect of the camera drives me nuts. Therefore I’ve only run one roll through it so far, and it’ll be awhile before I do so again. Not being able to select my aperture is just insanity! The camera did seem to perform well with getting the exposure right, although I did also have one or two blank or severely dark frames. I don’t know if this was exposure error, a defect in this particular camera, or user error…but hey, I wasn’t allowed to set anything myself, so it can’t be my fault.

I put in two 625 Alkaline batteries, with some aluminum foil stuffed in to make up the difference in battery height. Seems to work just fine.

This is a ‘fast focusing’ rangefinder. By that I mean the focusing ring has a relatively short travel range. Focusing is possibly less precise, but faster to get where you need to go. The overlaid-image portion of the viewfinder is an ill-defined blob of a circle, but the image itself is reasonably bright and easy to focus. The size is pushing the limits of what my big hands can properly control, but it’s still usable.

I want to like this camera. But for quick shooting, in street photography for example, it’s hard to rely on range/zone focusing with this camera. You don’t know what your aperture is, so you don’t know what your depth of field is. Therefore you can’t just set the camera to its hyperfocal distance and shoot away. Nor can you reliably approximate the distance and pray your depth of focus is sufficient to compensate for bad guessing. You have to be precise with your focusing, in other words. Also the thumbwheel film advance is a little slow and cheesy-feeling. The ECR *is* small enough that no one will take you seriously, which is probably a good thing.

Camera Profile: Kodak Pony 135

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Manufacturer: Kodak
Model: Pony 135
Film: 35mm
Type: point-and-shoot, scale focusing.
Lens: 44mm Anaston lens, f/3.5, helical focusing. Minimum focusing distance: 2.5 ft. Apertures: f/3.5 – f/22. No filter thread.
Shutter speed: 1/25 s – 1/300 s, and “Bulb”. Leaf shutter. Shutter is cocked with lever on the side of the lens (flash-sync side). Flash presumably syncs at all speeds. Flash sync is an archaic ASA Bayonet socket.
Features:
double exposures possible, as shutter may be fired without film being wound first.

This is a very simple camera. So simple, in fact, that it sat unused in my closet for several years after I acquired it as part of a bigger purchase. In fact I only recently dusted it off because I needed a simple point-and-shoot that would allow me to take double exposures. Scale focusing can be a challenge if you’re not good at estimating distance, which I’m not (but getting better at it!). I happen to have a custom made sync cord for this type of Kodak sync socket, made by Paramount Cords. I’ve never tried using flash on this camera though, so no idea what the experience is like.

What’s to love, or at least like, about this camera? Well it does have that Anaston lens, which I assume is named after Jennifer Aniston and therefore is as sharp as its namesake. I mentioned the double exposure capability…that’s about it! The camera has a nice, solid feel to it. Made of bakelite and metal, it’s substantial but comfortable in the hands. Will I use it much? Probably not…doesn’t give me enough lo-fi magic to make it worth shooting with.

FREE film giveaway no. 2!

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[NOTE: This giveaway is now closed. See below for the winner.]

This is the second free film giveaway, and it’ll be a regular occurrence until supplies get low.

I recently acquired several grocery bags full of film from a fellow photographer. It?s all expired, but has been kept refrigerated and so is still perfectly fine. I thought I?d share the wealth!

This time, one lucky person will receive three (3) rolls of Fuji NPH 400 (color) 35mm film, 36 exposures. I?ll ship it anywhere in the world.

The rules:

? Void wherever taxed, licensed or prohibited. Don?t enter if it will get you or I in trouble. No purchase necessary (or even possible, as I am not currently selling anything).

? You must tweet (or retweet) the link to this post on Twitter. Use the handy icon below. If you don?t have a Twitter account, perhaps it?s time you signed up for one?

? Comment on this post, by putting your Twitter user name below. That way I can verify that you?ve tweeted a link to this post. Make sure you enter a valid email address when commenting (in the non-published email field), as I will contact the winner that way.

? The winner will be randomly selected from those who participate. The Twitter user name of the winner will be posted in the blog post itself, on Monday June 28th, some time in the morning (Pacific Coast Time). I will email the winner for his/her mailing address at that time.

? Previous winners (sorry, Syd!) are not eligible. But I’d appreciate the retweet anyway.

You can see the previous giveaway here (link).

And the winner is: @toycamerabr

Each person entering was added into a spreadsheet. I used the random number generator at www.random.org to generate a number between 1-12 (the number of entrants). The number ’3′ was selected, which corresponded to the row that the winner was on.

Thanks everyone for entering, and please add the RSS feed so you can be notified of the next one.

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.

On the Web: A Newbie's Guide to Medium Format Film

Busted! My Zorki-4

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So this happens from time to time: you see an auction on ebay, and the seller promises that the camera is completely functioning and in good order. You get the camera in the mail, only to find out the camera has a lot of unadvertised problems. You then struggle with the seller, and also struggle with the cost of shipping the defective camera back for a refund.

And so it is with the Zorki-4 I ordered from the Ukraine. I got my first test roll back from the lab, and this is what I discovered. Light leaks. Hey if it were a Holga I’d understand, but I’m not trying to go lo-fi with my rangefinder. And this is such a serious group of light leaks that it would be hard to take decent images with.

The film did tell me a lot about where the light leaks were coming from. I noticed that while many of the frames were just a swirl of light leakage, a few frames that I had taken in quick succession had only distinct blobs of light on them. Like this one below (that’s me, taken by my four year old). That got me suspecting a missing screw I had noticed on the front, after I’d already loaded film in it. Sure enough, the screw hole let light through. I think this accounts for the majority of light leaks in the camera, but I’ll have to test it further.

I took another look at the seller’s auction picture, and there was a screw in place on the camera when it was listed. That made me wonder if the screw had somehow fallen out in transit. So I dug the box out of the trash, and sure enough, I found a screw in the box! The screw however was too small for the hole, which makes me think it had been placed in the hole simply to sell the camera (and make a nice picture for ebay).

I found another problem upon examining the negatives. The shutter curtain had a very tiny hole in it. This is a common problem with cameras from the former Soviet Union, as well as other cameras that have a fabric curtain for a shutter. A camera user will leave his/her camera in the sun, and the lens will act as a magnifying glass, allowing the concentrated sunlight to burn a hole right through the fabric. This then appears as spots or even a thin light streak running parallel to the film, as the hole passes over the film when the shutter moves. You can see an example of this in the image above, in the upper left corner. There are two little blotches of light, although they’re subtle. If you look at the last image, you can see them in the upper right hand corner more distinctly.

The good news is, I might be able to repair this. The screw is a simple matter: find another screw and put it in the hole. I’m sure that screw is supposed to hold something together, so I should have one there for reasons other than light leaks anyway. I found a screw in my collection that fits well, so problem hopefully solved there. Curtain pinholes take a bit more work, and I’ll detail the fix of that in a later post.

It’s also possible that there are other leaks that I have not been able to identify. So when I do test this camera again, I will shoot maybe a quarter of the roll its ‘fixed’ state. Then, for the remainder of the roll, I will tape up all the seams and edges with duct tape, in case light is coming in through the edges. If I end up with a 1/4 roll of light leaks, I know I’ve got some light traps to fix.

Coming home from the lab yesterday with a useless roll of film got me rethinking the home-development issue. A few years ago I developed my own film, but quit when I moved almost exclusively to digital. My film usage was mostly color, and the occasional roll of black and white sent to the lab was no big deal. But after spending $6.50 on this last roll, and two trips to and from the lab, I think I might bust out the chemicals again.

I did get one nice image off the roll, which is below. This was the last image, and that’s probably why it looked ok. It never got wound all the way over to where the screw-hole light leak could do the most damage. There is still a light leak at the top of this image, and the curtain hole problem…but I like it.

So the moral of the story? Not every camera you buy is going to be in perfect shape. These things are old and will eventually break. It’s disappointing to get something that needs repair when you weren’t expecting it. However there are so many resources online, and so many people willing to help you, that many camera problems can be solved with just a little effort. I’m off to the hardware store today, so I can attempt to fix the curtain of my Zorki-4.

UPDATE: Unfortunately I was only able to fix some of the light leaks. There is another one I can’t figure out, and have decided it’s not worth the trouble (in light of its other troubles as well). So I’m returning the camera to the seller. This doesn’t mean all Zorki-4 cameras are bad, just this particular unit.

Go Shoot!: Pinhole Lens Cap

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I have a Zenza Bronica EC, which is a medium format 6x6cm (2-1/4 x 2-1/4″) camera. One of the nice things about it is that it has two ways to mount a lens: it will accept a Bronica S/S2 type lens, or it will accept a simple screw-mount lens as well (57mm diameter I believe). This happens to work well with a very common Minolta extension tube set found on ebay. I turned the cap and one of the rings into a pinhole “lens”, by drilling a hole in the cap. I placed over it a pinhole I’d made a couple of years ago from tin, measured somewhat precisely using my scanner. It had an aperture of f/369 (no that’s not a typo!). So using Fuji HGII ISO 800 film, my exposure was 1/2 s to 1 s in full sunlight. The “lens” focal length was about 110mm, so slightly telephoto for the angle of view.

I like the blurry people, but I’m not very fond of the overall unsharpness. I did intentionally build sand castles and rock towers and placed the camera near them, so that the sense of scale would be distorted. But ultimately I don’t know if this is the best subject matter for pinhole (in my opinion, anyway).

The very last shot is one I took with a regular 75mm lens. F/16 at 1/1000 sec. I used that lens to help line up the shot before switching over to the pinhole.

Tricks: Flipped Double Exposure

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Morgan Stanley Building, Oxnard CA

I was going through my camera closet the other day, digging out film cameras that had been sitting for awhile. Except for a few that I use all the time, I’ve gotten rid of most of the 40-odd film cameras I had collected. The only ones left were ones that were broken or unsellable for whatever reason. I stumbled across a Kodak Pony 135 camera, which is a cheap bakelite-body zone-focus camera that shoots 35mm film. I had previously dismissed it as worthless, and have never used it (I believe it came in a box with another camera that was much more interesting). However I realize now that there might be some lo-fi magic in that little box.

Before shooting, I headed over to flickr to see if anything good could come of a Pony 135, and found a flickr group dedicated to the camera. Immediately I was struck by this image by moxpox. And a whole series of these flipped double-exposures using different cameras. I was hooked, and loaded some (expired 99¢ store) film in the Pony right away.

I’ve never thought much of double exposures. Most of the time they look cheesy to me, because there is often no meaningful connection between the two exposures. It often looks like a cheap trick: ooh look I’ve got two pictures on one frame! But the flip makes sense visually. The content remains simple, and symmetry is built where perhaps none existed before.

The process is simple. You need a camera where the shutter cocking mechanism is separate from the film winding mechanism. Many cameras go out of their way to prevent double exposure.I have a few other cameras that will do this, and there are of course many more: Ricoh Super Ricohflex, Holga 120N, Bronica HC and Bronica ETR-s, Argus C3, Kodak Bantam and all my large-format lenses. Even some cameras that try to prevent double exposures can be tricked: I believe the Yashica Electro 35 GSN can do a double exposure, if you hold the ‘film rewind’ button underneath, while advancing the film wind lever. The film ends up staying in one place for that shot. Other cameras might be able to do this too…just give ‘em a try!

When shooting, you pick a simple subject and simple background, and visualize the final result. Examine the frame, to determine where different parts of your subject line up, because you’ll want to duplicate that. Turn the camera 180 degrees, line it up in the viewfinder, and fire the second exposure before winding the film.

For more fun, consider filtering one or both exposures with different colored filters. I used small sections of Rosco cinegel from their sample book, but you could use colored celophane bought at a craft shop if you wanted. A dark filter is going to reduce the light considerably, so you could either meter through it and get a precise adjustment for your exposure, or just guess, or not bother adjusting at all. I didn’t bother adjusting! Images 1-3 and the last one all have some sort of filtering for one or both exposures, although I don’t recall what I did specifically.

Two minor details to consider:

Since you’re giving the film twice the amount of exposure, you should adjust your aperture and/or shutter speed so that you’re underexposing by a stop. It’s film however, so you can probably get away with just shooting normally. Film doesn’t usually mind if you overexpose it a little.
Parallax can become an issue if you’re shooting a close subject. Even if you use a rangefinder that compensates for parallax error in the viewfinder, the flip will throw things off. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as is evidenced by the barbwire fence image below. It’s just harder to achieve perfect symmetry with close subjects. An SLR will not have this problem, but twin-lens reflex cameras, rangefinders and zone-focus/point and shoot cameras will.

For the brick wall below, I didn’t do a flip. Instead I shot the wall straight on, and then for the second exposure I angled up and to the side, to get a perspective shot.

The final shot is seriously overexposed! My finger was near the shutter cocking lever when I fired the second exposure, and apparently that interferes with the shutter closing. I’m surprised actually, as I would have thought the shutter’s closing would have been independent of that lever. Made for a nice effect though!

barbwire fence

gravel yard

brick wall

Altoid spill

my kids on the beach

Beach

Cameras and Film

Stuff about Cameras and Film, by Professional Photographer Matt Haines.