Today’s #filmfriday post is a little different from previous posts in this series and focuses on making portraits using film. And because lately I’ve been in a goth frame of mind, it features my favorite goth model*
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Available light is any damn light that is available!”–W. Eugene Smith
It doesn’t matter what person, place, or thing that you’re photographing, the ultimate subject of any photograph is light and it’s the quality of the light that ultimately determines the effectiveness of your portrait.
Here’s A Few Reasons
Here are a just a few of the aspects that I like about shooting portraits using available light and it doesn’t matter whether I’m shooting with digital or film cameras.
It’s free. There’s no equipment to purchase, set up, plug-in, or chew through batteries. You can make photographs outdoors using natural light, as in today’s featured image, or indoors using window light. All you need is a camera and a subject willing to pose for you. You can supplement available light with inexpensive reflectors or make one yourself using a piece of foam core board.
It’s easy. You can see the light falling on the subject and won’t have to guess about lighting ratios or move lights around and dealing with lightstands, hair lights, booms or power cords you can trip over. You’ll quickly discover that, under these kinds of lighting conditions, the subject is more relaxed and you’ll both be less distracted.
It’s safe. You eliminate the expense of buying expensive shipping cases, the specter of damage or theft in transit, or schlepping cases to and from your vehicle.
It’s fast. There’s no setup time. You can work faster with the subject enabling getting more and better photographs while allowing them to relax at the same time.
How I made this portrait: OK, so this is not what you might call a traditional portrait or even a typical glamour image but I really liked how it turned out. This image of young model is in a style that might be called “Goth Glamour” and has what I feel is a cinematic quality that (again I feel) could have only been captured by using film.
In my video The Pros & Cons of Film Photography, I cite the film look as one of the reasons that I, among a lot of other photographers, like to shoot film.The portrait was made using available light in the outdoor shooting space of a friend’s studio on a day when it was closed to the public. The image was captured with a Contax 167 MT SLR that’s similar to the one I that recently acquired along with a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.7 lens and Kodak color negative film. You can see the original color image above right. Scans were from Kodak’s defunct Photo CD process and opened using Lemke Software’s Graphic Converter that is not without its quirks and features, especially for users of older computers and operating systems, like me.
The more I looked at this image the more I kept visualizing it in black and white. So I took the scanned image, which had already been tweaked with Analog Efex. and imported it into Silver Efex where I applied the High Structure (smooth) preset topping it off with a layer of the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex to knock off any hard edges.
*PS: I’ve been looking in my files for the name of this model, all of whom are listed in alphabetical order in my two model release binders. When I find it I would like to give her full credit on this and my other posts where she appears; she was an absolute delight to photograph.
If you would like to send me a roll of film to review or any other stuff that could be used for these posts and my videos, click on the Contact tab and I’ll send my mailing address.