NC Photography

Had a shoot with Rebecca Lawrence today – I’ve worked with her before, and she’s got to be one of the most experienced models I’ve ever been able to work with.  Both times I shot with her, I felt like my game suddenly got elevated to the next level, which given the way I usually improve slowly and incrementally is highly unusual.  We did a little bit of standing portraiture and some lingerie, then we went out to Jordan Lake for some outdoor shots.  What we ended up with are some of the best images I’ve taken to date, even before the cropping and color correcting that will undoubtedly be needed.  I was shooting both digital and film outdoors – 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor on the D70 digital, and a 75mm f/2.8 on the Pentax medium format.  The film was 400 speed Tri-X Pan from Kodak, most of my outdoor frames are f/16 at a shutter speed of 1/500 or 1/250 sec.  The digitals are mostly wider aperture, roughly the same shutter speed, but at a 200 speed setting.

I have a shoot tomorrow with Angelique Kithos, and I’m going to try to take her to the same spot – the water was about 75 degrees and there was barely a cloud in the sky all day.  Gorgeous weather for sightseeing, but tomorrow should have scattered clouds, which is even more ideal for photography than clear skies.  Next weekend I’m going to relax and not do any shooting, since I’m kind of swamped between work, class and shoots right now; I need the downtime.  I also need to get off my tookus and prep the next SCG update – I’m about a week and a half behind already, but in all honesty, shooting and getting classwork (and homework) done is a higher priority.

In other news, next week (starting Monday, two days from now), I start trying to bike in to work as often as possible – I’ve been meaning to do that for two weeks now and either my schedule or the weather ha gotten in my way, but it looks like Monday will be perfect to start that habit.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some film that’s begging me to put it on a spool and soak it in some chemicals. 

I’ve got a shoot at 1pm today, so in the meantime I figured I’d try to get Daisy’s film scanned, since it’s been hanging up “drying” for three days now.  I think it’s dry by now…  As I suspected, the first 12 exposures or so were completely unrecoverable – *severely* underexposed when shot, mostly because I hadn’t been paying as close attention to the camera settings as I should have.  Fortunately, I realized this halfway through the roll and was able to make adjustments.  This was the first shoot I did with my “new” lighting setup, and I was (and still am) thoroughly impressed with how much better the images look versus my old way.  Honestly, I still prefer daylight, but for some images, shooting outdoors is just no kosher (IMHO).  Here’s a sample from the recent scans, untouched by Photoshop:

Southern Comfort Times Two

Finally got the last of Kristen’s film scanned.  The indoor images are way off-balance, so I only scanned four or five of them total – matter of fact, I left an entire roll unscanned because of it.  I just didn’t have my shit together on lighting when I did that shoot, and it showed.  The outdoor shots were great – natural lighting is awesome – the indoor shots on film ended up the next best thing to complete crap.  I’m so glad I’ve gotten my shit together since then…  also, the fact that I’m only using B&W film anymore really helps.  I’ve got a roll of Daisy’s to scan, and then two rolls of Stephanie’s to develop and scan – all C-41 – then three rolls of 320TXP from my lunch walkabout on campus a week or two ago.  Feel free to take a look at the new images at the end of Kristen’s full album (all images in that album untouched by Photoshop so don’t whine about the temperature or color distribution wonkiness).

Just finished converting some raw film scans through Photoshop.  These are from the shoot I did with Kelli Vicious – the film was Kodak 400TX this time (as opposed 320TXP for Nicole’s shoot), the developer was still Ilford Ilfotec DDX.  Notice the contrastiness of the image as a whole, yet it doesn’t break down into hard outlines:

The Sign

My second roll came out even more boldly differentiated – much contrastier.  I think that was partly due to the changes I made in exposure settings (mostly apeture):

Doorway

And a final example:

Woodpile

So I finally got my entire film workflow set back up a few nights ago and I’ve been developing and scanning negatives in a mad rush.  The part that took the longest was finding decent scanning software – Epson makes great scanners, but their software is rather broken.  I finally discovered that Mac OS X’s Image Capture utility does exactly what I need it to, then I hand off to Photoshop for conversion and rendering (just like I do with digital camera files).

So the negatives I have scanned in now are from the shoot I did with Nicole Marie a month or so ago.  I used Kodak 320TXP film in a Pentax 645 medium format camera, developed in Ilford Iflotec DDX developer.  Here’s one example:

Sitting Pretty

I still love the feel of film.  The image looks so much more natural and realistic to me somehow than the digital images.  I did have some unintentional developing issues, I think because it’s been so long since I’ve done true black and white film development and I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have.  Some of them gave my negatives some effects which I thought were really cool – it gave them a very “old-timey” feel – vintage photographs, deteriorating but salvageable negatives from days gone by.  Here’s an example of the effect I’m talking about:

Smile

Notice the graininess over the whole image, the fading at the top and bottom of the image  it’s just really cool, IMHO.

More images yet to scan, and more rolls of film yet to develop…  Back later!