m.sawyer photography

a slew of firsts

A few weeks ago, my friend Cody asked me about shooting some maternity photos for her. She was about 8 months pregnant at the time, so there wasn’t much time for pondering the decision. I told her I would consider it but that it would absolutely be experimental. I had never done maternity shots before. 

So I spent the following week attempting to find good maternity photos for reference. Granted, I pretty much only looked on Flickr, but Flickr’s so easy to use and search, and I like their built-in content filters. What I found was a little shocking: I found great disdain for almost every maternity photo I saw, though I couldn’t quite put my reasoning into words. And then I found this photo. I was instantly inspired by it and it didn’t offend me in any way. I began to realize that the only maternity photos I found artistically inspiring, genuine, and interesting were almost all nude. 

This presented a problem. I’d also never photographed a nude person. And I was sure that Cody (or at least her husband) would not be interested in doing such a shoot. Besides it seemed so easy for me to botch such a sensitive project. So the decision was pretty much made at that point. Or so I thought.

I met up with Cody again later and explained all of this to her. But she surprised me by actually being quite open to the idea. What a brave woman! It turns out her husband was as well. Now I had to scramble and figure out how to accomplish such a shoot. Next challenge: lighting.

So far I have mostly done portraits in natural light (or natural+reflector light) outdoors. For obvious reasons I couldn’t really pull this off unless we went way out in the country. Plus I wanted to use extremely heavy shadows that were meticulously placed. For that I would need studio lighting. Another first for me. 

My friend Travis Hall was kind enough to let me borrow an AlienBees monolight and a couple of large softboxes to try out. I had a couple of hours to set the light up in my living room and practice. I’ve been a long-time fan of the Strobist blog and have probably learned most of what I know about off-camera lighting from there. It still takes a lot of practice and experience though to master the subject. Nevertheless I was able to finally figure out an approximate lighting setup that I wanted to use for Cody.

The actual shoot went incredibly well. I setup the large softbox angling down and towards the back of the room behind Cody, and the ambient light coming through sliding glass doors (and covered by a white sheet) was pretty low but very soft. I started out with my Canon and a 35mm/1.4L lens (highly recommended lens by the way) to warm up for my primary technical goal: to capture shots with my medium format cameras. That part went quite well too, except for the fact that, for some unknown reason, I metered based on the highlights instead of the shadows. As a result I significantly underexposed most of the shots. Thankfully black and white film has awesome dynamic range and exposure latitude and I was able to recover enough of the shadows in post. So the resulting photos were probably a little more “film noir” and contrasty than I had anticipated. But perhaps that’s exactly what I needed anyway.

update: I made the photo clickable, in case you want to see the rest of the set.

film: scanning observations and tips

Well, the future is now. And I’ve invested in a scanner. I decided to go with the Epson V500. After a lot of research (and after not having much cash to spend), I figured the differences between the V500 and V700/V750 were not worth the money at this point. I would say that I’m dreaming of one day getting a Nikon 8000 or 9000. However, by the time I can afford one of those, I think either A) medium format backs may actually be within reach, or B) the quality of upper-end full-frame DSLRs may punch through the dynamic range barrier that medium format digital kits currently transcend.

As of now I’ve scanned around 7 or 8 rolls of 120. And I see what everyone was talking about when they mentioned a scanning “learning curve”. So without further rambling, here’s a nice little list of what I’ve learned:

Hardware:

• Can’t speak for 35mm film, but for 120, you might as well throw away the film holder that comes with the scanner and get one of Doug Fisher’s Better Scanning holders with the glass insert. Without one, you’ll invariably experience 1 or 2 major problems: newton rings, and out-of-focus scans.
• The Epson V500 is rated at 6400 dpi. For all practical purposes, this number is meaningless. Kinda reminds me of the annoying and useless feature called “digital zoom” on most point-and-shoot digital cameras. The V500, from my not-so-scientific testing, seems to me to have a maximum resolution of around 2000 dpi. This would yield a decent 5x7” print from a 35mm shot, or about a 12x18” print from a 6x7cm shot. Not too shabby. But this depends on whether your scanning and post-processing technique is adequate, and ultimately on how sharp the negative/positive is in the first place.

Software:

• Forget about the software that comes with your scanner. Get Vuescan Pro. It gives you just about every feature you could want in a scanner: multi-pass, multi-exposure, raw scanning, DNG files, 48-bit, and more. Silverfast AI is too expensive. Silverfast SE is possibly the most laughably horrible software I’ve ever seen. EpsonScan isn’t bad, and actually it’s probably the easiest to use. But it doesn’t give you enough control. The only thing that drives me crazy about Vuescan is that its multi/auto cropping tool is amazingly bad. But since I’m not scanning a zillion frames at once, I can live with it.

Film:

• The new Ektar 100 is awesome! My style in digital photography lately had been shying away from any vivid colors, prefering an aged, desaturated look. But seeing the poignant colors come up on the screen from the Ektar made me revisit my thinking here. Not that I’ll abandon the desaturated look though.
• Using old, cheap, expired film has its drawbacks. The quality from edge to edge of the frame is unpredictable. Sometimes this gives a nice pastel washy effect, but sometimes it looks dingy and unintentionally dirty (not in a cool way, in my opinion). The Fuji Superia 400 I used was also somewhat crinkly and difficult to work with in the scanner.
• Fuji Neopan 400 is an awesome film to scan (and great for home darkroom processing, so I’ve heard). It lies very flat, has moderate, pleasant grain (in 6x7 anyway), is pretty sharp, and has just beautiful tonality. The histograms show a nice soft falloff, making the digital files extremely easy to work with in Lightroom. I was able to overexpose it by several stops to retain all the shadow detail and I almost never lost any of the highlight detail. Highly recommended.

Technique:

• If you’re going to do much beyond just posting the images to the web, take the time to learn how to sharpen your files well. This doesn’t just apply to the digital processing of film photos, it also applies to digital photography (albeit less importantly). Files straight out of the scanner are going to be pretty soft. Here is a great tutorial about sharpening in Lightroom: here and here. Here is a great post about 3-step sharpening in Photoshop.
• The dynamic range and tonality of film are a lot of the reason why I love it so much. I was pleasantly surprised that my V500 was able to capture this decently well. Of course this was after painstakingly perusing Vuescan’s features, doing lots of tweaking. I think there are two reasons why I was able to capture great tonality and range: 1) scanning in 48-bit mode, and 2) using the multi-exposure feature of Vuescan. This produces giant files but I don’t mind. The quality is totally worth it to me.
• Vuescan totally confounded me at first. It was producing crazy, useless, color-shifted images until I found out how to get the proper settings and calibrate it for the particular film:

1. 1. Load the film up in the scanner and hit Preview.
   2. Drag a selection window over a strip of film that is blank, in the margins of the film.
   3. Hit Calibrate.
   4. Preview again.
   5. Check the box for “Lock Exposure”.
   6. Preview again.
   7. Check the box for “Lock Film Base Color”.
   8. Turn off any color correction that may be applied automatically by Vuescan. You’re probably better server by adjusting these things in Photoshop, not Vuescan.
   9. In the output section, make sure you’re Saving “As Film”.
   10. Hit Scan and you’re on your way.

That’s all for how.