MC winter photo session

There I was on Thursday, working on an essay for my other blog (on the drought and the price of water) when I got a text from Michelle, my favourite model, and best run and swim buddy ever, if you haven't been following along in the other blog for the last decade or so. 

She said, 

"I have a photo shoot idea… Might you be curious? I would love to capture a photo in a snowstorm in all black-and-white. Me wearing black, the white snow swirling around and in the background, and just have my red hair being the only thing that’s coloured in the photo. Maybe lipstick to any idea how to technically accomplish this?"

Well, holy doodle! Photographers live for such things. I nearly sprained a finger typing yes. We texted back and forth a bit and it turned out she also wanted to show off a corset she had made. Duh!

1. Here's one of the last photos.

As an aside, it's been snowing off and on here for the better part of a week, so the odds of at least some snow swirling around were pretty good. I was hoping for some big fat fluffy flakes gently drifting down, camera on a tripod, for a slightly long exposure to increase the swirl effect. Or maybe an HDR of 3 different exposures, maybe merged, maybe not. Plus the snow covers all the ugly half melted ground.

We both had things on Thursday afternoon. My eyes are good, thank you very much, only a small change to the astigmatism part of the prescription. I might not have needed new glasses, but these are 3 years old, and the coatings are starting to wear off. Plus there's a sale in April. I digress. She had a thing Friday morning.

We met up about noon, so less than 24 hours from idea to making it happen. Never let it be said we are sloths when it comes to a great idea. There were a few more ideas generated. Her skirt had an interesting pattern on it that I wanted to try to capture. I can see it in Lightroom, not so sure if it will show up here. I had figured out a location and we were off. It wasn't the snow we dreamed of, but it was off and on. You can see the flakes in some of the photos. The overcast skies and snow created wonderful soft light.

We started on the path at the south end of my neighbourhood, on the edge of the hill going down into Fish Creek. I wanted an uncluttered white background to show off the black and red. We had fun trying different ideas just to see how they would turn out. Some worked well, some not so well, but that's the fun of collaboration. One of the things I love about Michelle is that she can project so many different moods, fun, joyous, serious, sultry, mysterious. I can make up a story, and she can project the image. 

Just so you know. Michelle is a real woman of an age to be thinking seriously about retirement. Her skin has tried to kill her at least once that I know of. A Photoshop pro could smooth out her skin and make her look like a teenager, but we both wanted the photos to be of her, not some fanboy Photoshopped version of her. Neither are were we trying to look like the cover of some fashion magazine. They have what I consider to be normal editing in Lightroom and nothing more. The trickiest thing was tweaking the sliders to affect how the skirt pattern would show up. 

The main point was to have fun and and with a bonus if we generated some images that we liked. Both of us are really pleased about the whole thing. You can get Michelle's perspective on her blog here. I have to say I'm enormously flattered.

2A. Yes she is enjoying herself, trying to create a swirl of snow on her own.

2B. Same photo converted to black and white, just because.

3. It wasn't actually that cold out, so no, she's not freezing her shoulders off.

4. You might be thinking indoors, against seamless paper, but no, outdoors. See above.

5. We moved down into Fish Creek, thinking about picnic tables, a bench, and a bridge. 

6A. She found these trees and they turned out to make a great frame.

6B. I decided to try this one in B&W as well.

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8.  We spent lots of time with the bridge and nearby bench.

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13. She had just refreshed the hair dye and wanted to show it off. Other than slightly tweaking the white balance, I've not adjusted the colour at all. 

14. I liked what the skirt is doing here.

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17. These two didn't know what to think. We had a few other passers by during the session, with one woman watching for a few minutes while her dog did it's business. 

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There are many more photos, of course. I didn't want to overload this post, so there will be some showing up in the Of the Day section in posts on my other blog. 

Technical end notes. I started with the 100 mm lens because I was thinking a static portrait at first. Then we realized we wanted the freedom for her to move around a bit, so I switched to the 70-200. No tripod, no HDR. I'd even brought a film camera with colour film in it, but once I got started I didn't even think of it. Much like the double exposure session a couple weeks ago, this was NOT a serious gig, working through a shot list for a paying client, with makeup artists, assistants, and entourage standing there watching us, checking the time because they get paid by the hour. Mostly it was us making it up as we went along. The important part was to have fun exploring an idea, and we did, and I'd do it again, using some of her vision board photos as inspiration. Yay us!

Double exposure on black and white film

So there I was, with 2 more rolls of Ultrafine Extreme 100, which I didn't particularly care for after exposing one roll. Or maybe I don't know how to take the best advantage of it. I'd been thinking about swapping it with a buddy, but then the idea of double exposures came to me. Nothing really lost if it didn't work, and since I wanted to take one of the cameras for a walk anyway... 

I'm pretty sure that anyone reading this knows what a double exposure is all about, but a brief digression for those that don't know. There you are happily taking photos, and you forget to advance the film after taking a shot. The film gets exposed twice, and depending on exactly what the subjects are and how they're aligned, you'll see parts of both images. The result can be a hot mess, or it can be remarkable. 

1. Here's a nice example. I first exposed the tree, then Michelle was later. The tree trunk hadn't been exposed to much light, so when I did the second exposure the light bouncing off Michelle was captured by the relatively unexposed film, so we see both layers.

In an ideal world, or when it's done by someone that really knows what they're doing, the two layers complement each other. It adds some complexity and ought to make the photo more interesting to look at. Sort of like how a photo with a reflection is better than a photo of that subject without a reflection. Part of the fun is the unexpected. The happy accidents or coincidences, as you will see. Doing this with expired film, or a camera that has light leaks, or using a vintage lens, or developing the film with unusual chemicals all add to the unexpected.

In the digital world there are several ways of doing this. Photoshop comes to mind, but many cameras let you choose how many exposures will overlap. The advantage is you can see your results on the back of the camera, and try again if you don't like it. The disadvantage is you have to do it all in sequence, so there's a problem if the background is one place, and you want to capture your subject in a different place. Let's not even talk about arcane camera menu systems.

Attentive readers will remember I did this on film. There is no seeing what an exposure looks like. I went out and captured 36 photos of random things, usually dark things, often trees, just because they were about the only dark things outside on a bright snowy day. But there were a couple garage doors, the side of a retaining wall, car windows, a garbage can, a bus stop bench, a chalkboard, a blanket. It almost doesn't matter what the background layer is. I was aiming to have the centre fairly dark, intending to put Michelle there.

Generally camera manufacturers want to make things easy for the consumer and prevent them from doing things wrong. For them, a double exposure is by definition wrong, so they design cameras that prevent mistakes. For example, it would be extremely difficult to do double exposures on my GW690. The camera makes you wind the film to the next frame before the shutter button unlocks. To do a double exposure I'd have to expose the roll, then go into a completely dark room to wind the film back onto the original spool, making sure the backing paper doesn't separate, and that it's wound tightly onto the original spool. Then load the camera again. At least the loading can happen in light, and then you'll be able to align the arrow on the film backing with a marking in the camera so the frames align. That's a lot of work, and I can't see myself doing that.

Instead, I'm using my EOS-3 camera. It rewinds the film leaving the leader out. Open the camera, and load that same roll of film again. There's a little marker to pull the leader to, which means the frames will be nearly exactly aligned. Close the camera, there's a click and whir, and the first frame is ready to go. No muss, no fuss.

A couple days later I collected Michelle and we went for a walk. I did not take any notes on what the first layer was for this first roll. There was no planning to think the first layer is this, so the pose should be that, placed here in the frame. I did the exposures like I normally did, none of this doing half the exposure since it will be exposed twice. The theory is that by and large, you're exposing different parts of the negative.

We just treated it like a fun portrait session, trying some different things, with different backgrounds. We've done several of these and they've all been fun. She is an amazing model. If you haven't been following along, here's a gallery of other photos I've taken of her. At one point we had a couple of older men in powered mobility scooters watching. Michelle commented that she thought they might be waiting to see if she was going to take her blouse off. Not. It was a sunny day, but still much too cold for that sort of thing, even if we were into it.

We finished off that first roll and zoomed home to have lunch. (Gluten free bison lasagne from Soffrito, in case you're wondering.) Then down into Fish Creek with a new roll of film. Again, mostly random background photos, although there were a few we made a few mental notes about the frame number, and possible poses to layer on top. 

For this first time I was thinking that if I got one frame that worked out of the 72 exposures, I'd be happy. After all, it's a new thing, working totally blind. Some of them were a hot mess, but about half worked out well enough to make a pass at editing. Interestingly enough, the ones I edited are evenly split between the first and second roll. Dust spots weren't much of a problem, but a hair was across the film camera lens for a few photos. Oh well. 

Here's a few more of the ones I really liked. Remember, the second layer was exposed totally blind to what was on the first layer. The nice alignment of some of them is a happy coincidence.

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11. She often insists there should be a photo of me, and is happy to take the camera.

12. Here's the example proving I'd need to take written notes. I did the background for this one between 6 and 7 above. Then when I looked at it a couple of days later, I had no idea what the background was. (Look for the faint stars.) I knew it had to be in the house, between the chalkboard message thingie and my computer in the back room. It took a while to figure out.

Notes for next time? Track the orientation. There was one where I took a photo of a door, thinking it would be nice to have the second layer being Michelle walking. Except I goofed, the door was landscape, and Michelle was portrait. Oops. That happened a few other times as well, making for a bit of weirdness. It looks like this.

13. We all know trees don't grow horizontally.

Notes for next time. Scale doesn't matter. The first layer could be a macro photo of something, or a close up of tree bark, or fabric, or a book cover, or a thunderhead off in the distance. Anything really. I'm working up a list of things to try. You'll note that 7 above is a computer screen. Think about skin tones compared to the background. It seems I disappear into tree bark, like in 10. Mixed materials are fine; in 13 that's a stone wall behind Michelle, mixed with the horizontal trees.

I might think a little more on exposure, perhaps tending to slightly underexpose the first layer, but not so much that it goes muddy or loses contrast, then like normal with film, tend to overexpose the second layer. Depending, of course on what the background and subject are going to be. But rather than read about it, go try!

These were inverted using Negative Lab Pro. Generally I don't do much editing in NLP, but most of these I pushed the sliders a bit more. You'll have to experiment to see what works or not. I tried some Lightroom brushes to work on parts of the image, typically trying to make her face more visible. I got mixed results there, but then again I'm not terribly good at that anyways. 

Am I going to do this again! Absolutely!

Visions in reflections

I'll tell you right up front, this is going to be a messy blog. If dust spots in photos drive you crazy, bail out now. This is not particularly a film review, since the photo environment are nothing close to optimal. The film does not show to advantage, but to be fair, I'm not sure any film would.

There's been a couple rolls of Visions 3 250D in my fridge for a while. My lab has a two roll minimum for developing ECN2 film, so I was looking for something where I could go through 2 rolls all at once. For that reason alone I won't buy any more of it. I've done another batch of this film, mostly outdoor garden photos. The colour is pretty good, though some photos have a faint orangey red tint. I think this is a film that likes lots of light, and the outside photos kind of remind me of Ektar.

Some friends had been thinking about doing a photo ramble but it was seriously winter again. Someone suggested it had been a while since they had been in Calgary's +15 system. If you don't know, it's a series of bridges connecting many downtown buildings. The bridges are nominally 15 feet above street level, thus the name. There are some +30 and even +45 levels. There are any number of shops spread through the system. Last I looked it took up about 16Km of walkways. They are very popular in Calgary winters. It might, or might not be, a bit further to walk to your destination, but you don't need a coat. 

Almost all have windows giving a variety of views. As soon as it was suggested, I was in. I love reflection photos, and with all the glass fronted buildings, and filthy +15 windows, and interior views, would give lots of composition fun. I deliberately aimed for a bit of a funky muddy look, wanting the interior reflections to be a ghost of the outside view. I wasn't going to get fussed about perfect focus of the outside, given the distortions in filthy window glass. Did I mention that after a long Calgary winter the windows are filthy?

There are typically some dust spots anyways, and there are some rem jet layer artifacts. I don't care. They add a layer. Dust spots and rem jet artifacts on the film. The filthy window with reflections inside and out. The outside subject and the reflections in it, and sometimes, the reflections in the reflections. Some might say not removing the dust spots makes me lazy, and I wouldn't argue a lot. I think the spots give a bit of a nostalgic air to the photos. Plus even after going to the effort of removing the spots, the photos are still not pristine, clear, sharp. Even if they were, they're still not going to be image of the year. 

Normally I'm pretty deliberate when shooting film, but this time I treated it almost like digital. I had 72 exposures and by golly I was going to get them all so I could drop the film at the lab on the way home. And I did.

I worked downtown off and on from the early 90's up to COVID. I liked walking through the +15 system. There's always something different, new art, new connections to explore, and always a chance to bump into colleagues. I'm pretty sure I've been in every corner of it over the years, and looking at the map I don't think they've added anything new. I'd been looking forward to the hanging glass sculptures in 8th Ave Place, but they're gone, as is the stack of coal sculpture in Western Canadian Place. The spherical fountain is still there, but needs maintenance.

Up till 2015 or so, it was a busy, happening place. Lots of little shops offering an endless variety of goods and services for the office worker crowd. The food courts were full at lunch time. Everybody had a place to get a favourite treat. People walked like they had a place to be, and knew the route. No dithering about whether this was the place to turn or not. Even the people chatting to buddies would move to the side or into an alcove.

We were there just before lunch on a Tuesday. It was almost sad. There was hardly anyone there. No lineups. There were places we could fire a cannon down the halls and not hit anyone. So many closed retail spaces. I had a really polite security guard ask me not to take photos in Western Canadian Place and she even said please. Unlike the brutes in Brookfield Place. Don't get me started on that. Still, I enjoyed the walk with Ann, Kelly, and Sean joined us later. I didn't see anyone I knew, but Ann did.

My runmeter app says I walked 14K, but I don't believe that. I parked in the Gulf Canada lot, navigated a complicated route (construction) to get to the Core to meet Kelly and Ann. From there we walked the long loop west. They called it a day, but I still had film to expose. I made it all the way to the Harry Hays building at the north east end of downtown. 

For the camera gear people, I'm using an EOS-3, with a 50mm f1.8 lens. No flash. No tripod. Developed at the bespoke lab I've mentioned. Digitized using a Canon T6i with Canon 100mm F2.8L macro and lightly edited in Negative Lab Pro and Lightroom.

There are 55 photos edited from the day. That's too many for a blog, so I've picked out some of the photos I found interesting for one reason or another. Like I said, last chance to bail out re: dust spots.

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2. The +15 was retrofitted into older buildings, and that sometimes means inside corridors and tight spaces. Interesting views to be had, from a little alley, to an expansive view.

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4. An inside parking structure and reflected windows outside.

5. The walkway past the parking structure, home to many cows. This is actually pretty close to the actual colours. 

6. Ann was patient as I figured out the exposure.

7. A selfie.

8. Just before I got asked not to take photos. 

9. One of the many views outside, with a hit of colour on a cold drab day, and a hint of interior reflections.

10. The inside atriums can offer interesting compositions.

11. So many building reflections!

12. We all think panes of glass are flat, but clearly not so here. It's fun, if distracting during a boring meeting, to watch the reflections ripple as the wind changes the air pressure.

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14. I'm actually amazed this turned out as well as it did. That sun reflection was really bright, but I still wanted to get a hint of the building details, and the sky is a happy bonus.

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16. Yes, there's a real airplane hanging in the Sun Life atrium. At Christmas time they put a Santa in there, waving. This colour isn't quite right. Both the yellow and red look a little dull, but that could be the interior lighting, not the film. 

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22. This is a 45 degree angle, with the reflection looking down the actual hallway, but with a space under construction on the other side.

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There's other photos from this ramble, with some stories to be told. They will probably show up on my other blog over the next little while. Stay tuned, and get out there to expose film!

2 years of film

After several years of digital photos, I got to wondering what using film would be like. Unlike some families, photography was not a big part of my life as a child. Even as a young adult, a film point and shoot was as tech as it got. I never considered buying a "real" SLR. Even with the point and shoot we often forgot to take it places.

Then the iPhone came along and I found I liked taking photos. (Don't get me started on the current incarnation of Apples desktop photo app.) People said some of them were pretty good. One trip we were wandering through a garden and Linda suggested that I take a photo of a birdhouse against a clear sky. I didn't, knowing it would be a tiny dot of colour, but it got me thinking about getting a 'real" DSLR. That happened mid 2016, and I fell in love with the world I discovered. I found that I saw the world differently when I was carrying a camera.

Fast forward to late 2021 and really early 2022, thinking more about film. I borrowed a pair of Nikon film cameras from a friend (thank you Sean!) and ran some film through them. I liked the experience, but the cameras never really felt at home in my hands, and I never really got the hang of the focussing split prism thing.

Then I picked up a big medium format rangefinder (Fujica GW690) and was hooked. I liked how it felt solid and comfortable in my hands. The Nikons went back to Sean, and later I picked up a 35m Canon 7 with a nice 50 mm lens. That was fun to use, but it locked up and I sent it away to be cleaned and go for consignment. I traded the lens in for a Canon EOS-3. It's not quite as much fun to use, being essentially an early digital camera that uses film. I've only used a 50mm f 1.8 lens I picked up cheap, but I could use the EF lenses for my digital cameras.

How much film have I exposed? This much. Each sheet is a roll of film, typically 36 images on 35mm film, and 8 images on 120 medium format. They're in an orange binder, which explains the colour. The binder lives in a box, which is in a dark room. I know the digital photos could go away in the blink of a hard drive failure, and yes I have backups. But assuming the house doesn't burn down, that binder of negatives could sit there till my death, and then be put in another box with some photographic heir intending to see what I had done, and it might take them 50 years to get to it, and the negatives will still be here. Not that I think I'm another Vivian Maier or anything. 

I've edited 306 frames of 6x9 from the GW690, and 295 between the several 35 mm cameras. If I count all the exposed frames, which covers a multitude of sins, it's probably over 1000 frames. Note that in the screen shot below that I'm not entirely consistent with keywording. At first I was tagging all the frames, regardless of what they were, and later I switched to just tagging the edited frames. Too lazy to go back and fix it.

Those that have been following along on this and my personal blog know that one of my film related projects was to digitize all the negatives from our point and shoot. While doing that I discovered a trove of old negatives from Linda's family. Both those got tagged with the film old negs keyword. It was surprisingly hard to date our photos, and all are from the mid-80's, to maybe late 90's or so. 

It was fun going back through the photos! Of course, most are poor quality, given that a complete non-photographer was holding the cheap point and shoot camera, and the film was probably the cheapest that Blacks carried. That's to say nothing about the automated development process.

At a high level my process looks like this. Using either camera, expose film. Get it developed at a bespoke lab a short drive from my place. Digitize using a T6i with a Canon EF 100mm F2.8L macro lens, and invert with NegativeLab Pro. I'll tweak the settings a bit, but I've found that moving the sliders too much makes the image go wonky. I'll remove the worst of the dust spots. That gets me photos to go in the blog.

None of the film images have gone up on the wall in a frame, but a few have been printed in my books. Those got a bit of extra attention re: dust spots and editing. A few times I've gone back to get a better photo of the negative using my main DSLR. I've even done some experimenting with gigapixel images from the Gw690 negatives. If I start with a sharp clean negative, I could get a huge print out of it.

Darkroom developing and printing? I haven't done either yet. The lab does a great job with developing and typically turns them around in a day or two. Plus, he has all the chemicals and has the process down pat. I'd have to get the gear, and learn how to do it, though it doesn't seem hard. It would be pretty hard for me to beat his price. As for printing, ACAD, or whatever it's called now offers darkroom printing courses, and I'm planning to take that after selecting a bunch of negatives to try it with. That should be fascinating. 

I started by trying different films, mostly going with what was inexpensive and available. I've had great results from Kodak Gold 200, though it's been hard to find in 35mm until recently. For black and white I went through a bunch of Acros II, but can't find that anymore, however I'm really happy with Delta 100 and FP4+ Although, I must confess I didn't track the settings for every photo and rigorously compare images to get a true understanding of which film gave me the results I liked best.

Neither do I directly compare digital to film, even though some photos are very similar. I don't have the technical expertise or patience to do it properly. And besides, it's already been done, back when digital overtook film. Lots of people didn't believe digital could be better. Just like an iPhone is all the camera that most people need for most situations, a digital camera is the tool for almost all photographers, especially professionals. The camera helps them get great images, they see the result instantly on the back of their camera so they know if they got their photo, and processing is fast. Edited images can be sent to a client right away. In today's world, faster beats better every time. If I'm doing event photography, of course I'm using digital.

So why film? There's two parts of film that I like. One is the slower process. I think more about the photos, especially using medium format. For that I'm trying to think in sequences of eights, since I get eight photos to a roll. I look for nice light and interesting subjects in a setting that plays to the strengths of film. I'm almost certainly not going to click the shutter as much as when I carry a digital camera. Digital makes the 'spray and pray' approach easy. But then all those photos have to be ingested, digested, reviewed, culled, processed, and before you know it you're on the Group W bench. I digress, but someone of you have now have a song running through your minds. With film I look at the scene more carefully and enjoy it for what it is, and sometimes consider deciding to not click the shutter as a form of pre-editing.

The other part is the look of film images. Even now, some of the digital image editing programs have presets or filters to give images a specific 'film look'.  It's hard to describe, but I think the transitions are smoother because of the fine silver halide grains in a random pattern, rather than a digital algorithm. Since the dawn of photography, photographers have been trying to make their photos look as good as possible. They achieved some amazing results considering the technical process limitations. Perhaps the results were because of those limitations.

But with digital there are essentially no limitations, including the human element. With some of the digital tools the human becomes a camera carrier. After they decide what direction to point the camera they have no further role in the production of the image. The camera, the computer editing program, and the printer decide what that image should look like. I look at some images and wonder if it's actually a real place.

My photos are the real world, and I try to present them that way. I don't dress them up in lurid colours, I don't replace the blue sky with a fake drama sky, and typically don't push the sliders too much, unless I'm deliberately doing that for a reason. 

With film images, it's even less processed. Not as flashy, but realer, if you'll accept that as a word. There's so much Photoshop that nobody trusts images any more. With film one could put a print on the wall, with a little light box and magnifying glass beside it and show the negative. I might do that if I ever get brave enough to exhibit my work in public.

A few people have stopped me when I'm carrying the GW690. It's big enough that it's obviously not a digital camera, and they ask about it, or film. There's been some nice conversations along the way. That never happens when I'm carrying a digital camera.

I'm just at the moment musing about putting in an order for a bunch of film, wondering how much I should get. There's a place near here that offers film at a good price, and even better, offers free shipping for orders over $150, which isn't hard to do at $13 to $15 a roll.

You're probably wondering which of my film images I like best from the last 2 years. I keep coming back to these four, and the B&W is probably going to be the first attempt at darkroom printing. All four of these made Image of the Month, two of them made Image of the Year in their year (2022 and 2023, (same link), one was the first runner up, and the other was the second runner up.

Here's my favourite two photos from the GW690. You might have seen them on Vero or one of my blogs, but that's ok. They're worth looking at again, or so I think.

A beaver pond in Yukon. I first saw the glassy clear reflections, then realized the initial letter of my name would appear if stood in exactly the right place. There was very little editing for this photo. Both are Kodak Gold 200. 

A long exposure just upstream of Elbow Falls. 

In 35mm these are my favourite two photos. Michelle projecting a mood of calm serenity. Canon 7, film is Visions 3.

During a walk on what is normally a swamp in Fish Creek. EOS-3 and Acros II.

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