Portrait project

For about 2 months now I've been working on using my dad's camera to teach me about shooting portraits in black and white using film. Tonight I picked up the last roll of scanned film and these are the pictures. I learned a lot in the process. It started with the picture above. I was asked to do a photo shoot for a customer's Linked account. We took about 100 pictures. With digital that's okay, but film is bloody expensive, so I really wanted to learn how to shoot portraits without shooting so much. I made an announcement on Facebook and got three victims er...I mean volunteers.

Dave was the first volunteer.

This is probably my favorite from the initial shoot.

With David I tried to take a lot of different poses. I was trying to figure out how to pose a subject.
Next was Toni:

This is my favorite from the shoot.

This is Toni intimidating Dave.

Toni wanted to add a prop, which I forgot added more shadows to be weary of.

This is the one time that shadows made me happy. It looks like she has a necklace from her earrings.

Next was Steven. I shot pictures of him with the much prodding from Toni.

When I got this film developed I quickly saw the importance of lighting and using it for me benefit and not against me. Tomorrow I will show other shots and talk a little more about what I learned.

Dave

I decided earlier this month that I needed to start taking more portrait shots, so I announced my desire on Facebook and got three volunteers. Dave was the first. I let Dave choose the poses, but I chose the different ways to shoot him. These are the best of the 15 or so I took of him.

The California Academy of Science, on film

I finally got around to developing the film from my trip to the Academy of Science building. This is what got shot on film.

Little Yosemite

I know a lot of people think beagles are annoying, but I love them. So I'm a little annoyed I couldn't get a focus on him and instead focused on stuff around him.
For this hike, I tried to play around with some concepts I was taught in my film photo class last semester - namely the concept of exposure time. So for some photos I used the shutter speed and aperture the camera suggested. For other shots I tweaked the shutter speed a little bit. I purposely went to a place with waterfalls to try this. However, it being a place with waterfalls, one of the things I should have thought to bring, but I did not want to hike in, was my tripod. Thus some of the shots are blurry.







One of the things that really pops out at me is how much dirt was either on my lens or on the negative when it got scanned. If I'm going to start scanning negatives, I need to get more familiar with my digital editing software, despite my object to digital editing or spotting corrections on prints.







This is probably my favorite shot. I am not a big fan of taking pictures of people, but Kathryn and I get along rather well and she is always a willing victim when in town. The texture on this shot is really impressive to me. This is what inspires me to shoot in film more. I don't get that type of texture on digital images.

One of the many investments I need to make is a zoom lens for catching birds flying near me.

I'm not totally sure what I was filming here.

Jill - a little out of focus.

Jill - better in focus but no way to see her beautiful face.