If you are at all interested in black and white photography, you might want to check out Podcast #8 of the Pixel, Grain & Cookies podcast with Barry Staver and myself, where I go off the deep end and make some crazy statements about black and white photography that you are completely free to ignore. There’s other stuff there as well…
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.”— Helmut Newton
One of my photographic heroes, Helmut Newton passed away on January 23, 2004. The Nikon D1 was first unveiled on June 15th 1999 but it wasn’t the first commercially available DSLR. Kodak’s 1.3 -megapixel DCS100 was released in 1991 and at the time cost $20,000. In today’s money that would be $$39,229, more than the cost of a brand new Mazda Miata! I don’t believe Mr. Newton ever shot with a digital camera. Most of the time he show with a Nikon film-based SLR using Kodak Tri-X or Ektachrome color transparency film. In the studio, he typically used a Hasselblad or a Rolleiflex.
It’s All Back & White to Me
These days ,no matter what or who I might be photographing with one of my film cameras, I’m more than likely to reach for some black and white film. It doesn’t have to be all of the images that get made during a particular photo session; maybe just one roll to, you know, see what happens.
Based on my recent film shooting experiences, more than likely my first choice would be Fujifilm Acros 100 but at $20 a roll I’m holding out for Kodaks new EktaPan which is available in ISO 100 as well as 400 and 3200. I’m also interested in trying some of the boutique black and white films that are out there, especially some from Lomography. Their MonoChrome Duet starter kit contains two of Lomography’s 35mm grayscale emulsions including a sample roll of Lady Grey, an ISO 400 film, and their Earl Grey ISO 100 film that I previously shot at a car show but would like to this film for some portraits. I think the faster Lady Grey might be fun for working on my street photography using film in the classic style. Each roll of yjos Lomography film is packaged in individual tin cans, just like the old film days, and each kit comes with a Lomography key chain. The kit is just $18.90 or $9.45 a roll not counting the extra goodies you get.
How I made this portrait: Kim might have been my first muse, although I may not have been aware of it at the time. I photographed her sitting in a chair in the living room of my former home using only available light from a narrow South-facing window. The portrait of Kim was made with a Contax 167 MT SLR, similar to the that I recently acquired along with a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.7 lens and Kodak Tri-X film, which was my go-to black and white film back in the OG film days.
Scans of the negatives were made with Kodak’s now-defunct Photo CD process and were opened on my 5K iMac using Lemke Software’s Graphic Converter that produces good quality files from Photo CD discs. The image was slightly underexposed .OK, maybe more than a little, so I used the technique outlined in my post Tutorial: Correcting Underexposed Portraits to fix it. The image file was then slightly tweaked using Vivenza, sharpened with Smart Sharpen, that I recently wrote about, and then layered with a bit of the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex.
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