Author Topic: One subject, one roll: my buddy LA  (Read 1643 times)

Indofunk

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One subject, one roll: my buddy LA
« on: June 21, 2015, 04:36:43 PM »
My friend L.A. and I share very little in common, photographically. He likes large crowds, I hate people in my photos. I like nature and open spaces, he hates it. This makes photowalking with him very difficult; one of us is always annoyed :D But one thing that neither of us chooses to focus on is portraits, so I suggested that we each take portraits of the other, as practice/getting out of comfort zone/etc. I chose the location, which was the Central Park Ramble, at a time when I knew there wouldn't be many people there (which of course annoyed him ;) ). I loaded up the SRT102 with TMax 100, which I've always though would be great for portraiture but never tried it, and here's what happened.

Side note: Peter sent me something, can't remember whether it was an exhibit or a book, called "Photographing Blackness". I'll admit that the few portraits that I've done have been mostly of people with light skin, and when I got these results back (as you can see, LA is very dark), I realized that certain things are very different about photographing people with very skin, like the fact that backlighting is pretty much impossible, metering is a bit tricky if you're used to metering on the face (why I didn't realize that at the time is beyond me ::) ), and midtoney backgrounds are kind of the best, at least out of the shots that I took. I think I need to do more portraits with him and test out these theories :) Also, completely unrelated, I need to stop down quite a bit :-\ I have a joke hashtag on Facebook called #onlymynoseinfocus, and embarrassingly that tag can be applied to way too many of these shots  :-[















(are the rules "only 6" or "at least 6"? I can remove the penultimate one if the former)

Late Developer

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Re: One subject, one roll: my buddy LA
« Reply #1 on: June 21, 2015, 06:20:06 PM »
Lovely set of photos, Satish.  A really striking looking chap and you've got the exposure to perfection, IMO.  A grey card to get an 18% grey reading will work whatever the background / skin colouration, though.

I used to shoot weddings in the early 1980s and almost had kittens when I was booked to shoot a wedding with a white groom and an ebony skinned South African bride, as I had no idea how I was going to meter for that combo.  To make matters worse, she was wearing an almost glowing white dress and he was in a dark navy blue suit. You know what, I took a meter reading of each of their attire and averaged them and it worked fine. In those days, I was shooting the old-style Ilford FP4 film via an OM2n and OM1n.

There are no hard and fast rules.  "One subject, one roll" was set up to cajole people (gently) into trying to six six keepers out of any one roll of film they shot - rather than just take random shots.  As you'll appreciate, this is relatively easier to do so from a roll of 35mm (but people to shoot quite liberally with that format) compared to as few as 6 shots @ 6x9 off a max of 8 options on a roll of 120 format (but people tend to concentrate a bit more when "wasting" 120).  If you've only got 5 or you've got 25, they're all fine....
« Last Edit: June 21, 2015, 06:21:38 PM by Late Developer »
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Bryan

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Re: One subject, one roll: my buddy LA
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2015, 05:49:55 AM »
I'm with you Satish, portraits are outside my comfort zone but I think you did a great job here!