Liv - Black and White
Model: Liv Blankenship
Fashion Designer: Truly Alvarenga
Hair and Makeup: Lisa Johnson
Photo Assistant: Amelia Zenerino
TweetElizabeth + Jeff
Married on March 24th, 2012 in Nashville, TN.
See their entire wedding gallery and purchase prints at my Store! Click Here!
Liv - color series
Model: Liv Blankenship
Fashion Designer: Truly Alvarenga
Hair and Makeup: Lisa Johnson
Photo Assistant: Amelia Zenerino
TweetAllyson + Ben
Wedding Date: 3.10.2012
Ceremony: Christ the King
Reception: Cannery Ballroom
You can view and purchase images from Allyson and Ben’s wedding HERE!
You can view and purchase images from Allyson and Ben’s wedding HERE!
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Polaroid Negatives
On Saturday, I photographed Ben and Allyson’s wedding in Nashville, TN. I ended up shooting a couple of polaroid images with my Hasselblad with Fujifilm FP-100C film.
The fun thing about this film is that you get a positive print and a film negative. To get the negative though you have to deconstruct the exposed polaroid packaging and then use bleach to take off the black backing. It had been over a decade since I had done this, so I forgot the little nuances in how to successfully retrieve the negative without damaging it.
Unfortunately, by the top two examples, you can see that I severely scarred the negatives. I’ll eventually post a ‘how to’ video on this process, but the short version is that the bleach I was using on the back of the negative got onto the front of the negative and ate away at the film emulsion. Whoops!
Though the bleach effect is kind of fun, and I can see where a photographer would want to play with this process in a very intentional way.
On my third attempt, I remembered a couple of little tricks that I learned in college, and as you can see above I didn’t ruin this one. Getting a positive print was tricky as well because my flatbed scanner doesn’t have a backlight in it, so I set the negatives on a light box and took photos of them with my digital camera. Then I inverted the photos in Photoshop and played with curves to get the correct look.
If I decide to do this with more of my polaroid negatives, I will probably end up sending them off to be professionally scanned. That way the colors and sharpness will be more accurate. The above images aren’t ideal, but they at least give you an idea of what the images look like.
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Kayla
On Monday I did a test shoot with Kayla to experiment with my new Hasselblad, test out some film and to try a new photo lab. For this shoot, I only used three rolls of 120 film, and the first roll already had two images on it from another day, so total I shot 34 frames. If I shot this digitally, I probably would have shot 200-300 just because I have a hard time not taking another frame. I’m helpless when you put a digital camera in my hands. It’s like I have to shoot more, because you know….I can always delete it later!
With film it forces me to be extremely selective with each press of the shutter button. Mostly, because I know I’m limited on the number of frames I have, and it costs me money each time. When I’m shooting film, I am editing on the fly instead of at the computer. This means I’m discarded ‘bad shots’ by not taking them to begin with, instead of having them take up space on my hard drives at home.
For this shoot I used 3 different types of film. The color film was an old roll of Portra UC 400 pushed two stops. What that means is instead of rating my light meter at 400, I rated it at 1600 and the lab increased the development time to compensate for the underexposure. Too bad Kodak doesn’t make this film anymore, because I love the look of pushing it two stops. I’ve got some new Porta 400 sitting in my office, so I’ll be testing how well that pushes soon. From what I’ve seen it handles it beautifully.
The black and white films are Kodak 400 TMAX and Ilford 3200, both were old and from at least 2006. For these I metered how I normally do, which is cutting the box rating in half, so I rated the TMAX at 200 and the Ilford at 1600. The films have a different look from each other. The 3200 is really grainy, but I kind of like that. The TMAX is much smoother and is the least grainy of the film I used. Of course, the color film wouldn’t show any grain either except that I pushed it, so that brought out the grain.
Oh…and I used Indie Film Lab for the development. They did a great job! I’ll be using them again for sure! Below are my favorites from the shoot!
These first two images are from the Kodak 400 UC roll that I pushed 2 stops.
The next four images were taken on Ilford 3200.
These last two were taken on Kodak 400 TMAX. I’m going to be using Tri-X for my black and white from here on out though. I like the contrast that Tri-X offers better!
