Category: Portrait

This is a test of my reintroduction to b&w film photography. I recently had the desire to see all of my extended family. I made some soft plans to go visit them, I decided I should photograph them when I see them, I decided I should shoot film for the project, I decided I should photograph them all with the same camera, same film, same distance to subject. Thus the portrait project I am calling “The Last Film Project”. I plan to photograph all my living relatives with my Hasselblad 500 C/M, with TMY (sometimes TMX) black and white film by the end of 2020.

I had not use my Hasselblad in years, maybe a decade. I ran a roll of film through the camera a while ago to check that everything was functioning correctly. It works perfectly. These are images from a friends wedding this summer. I want to test out the framing and close focus, so I asked some friends for a quick portrait out by the barn. The light was fading so I shot them quickly standing in open shade, backlit. The old eyes are not what they used to be. I struggled with the old ground glass focusing screen and missed focus on about half the images. I need more practice and possibly may want to use some strong cheaters.

As you can hopefully see all the couples really like each other. They were fun to shoot. Fun to be shooting film again. I even have to break out a light meter!

I shoot the film and send it off to North Coast Photo in Carlsbad CA and get processed, sleeved film with large scans in about a week.

A collection of images from a holiday family photography session. This is a case where the family asked me to come to them. The other option being the family come to me in the studio or we go to a location not the house. It was right near the holidays and the entire family was home for a week or so. I had photographed the youngest daughter a few years ago and the Mom asked me to come to the home. I had a lot of fun with this session. They are a really nice family and a joy to work with.

We started indoors and carved out a corner of the living room and removed any holiday decorations, making a simple background and setting. After that we went to the backyard where we got a bit lucky with the lighting. The day had been fairly overcast and as we started shooting the clouds thinned giving us a slightly contrasty backlit scene. The temperature was right about freezing, so not so comfortable. The family were troopers and did not let the chill show for the photographs.

Mom recently got back to me with the print order. We had a conversation about images and sizes. I went back to the original file and reprocessed the images with more care. For holiday family photography I don’t alway need to retouch individual faces and did not need to do so for this set. I did have to remove a few unwanted indoor items. The print order came back to me in about a week and I delivered the images. Happy family.