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Oct, 2014Views
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
The picture was taken in a place called melody box. It's a place of many different activitiesl, several bands rehears and have gigs there, they hold aerobics classes, there is a workshop, one can learn some martial arts or do you prefer Yoga? It's more or less a run down left over house that they missed to tear down when building the new nabourhood. It now gets used by everyone for everything. We have our darkroom there and on this particular evening we had turned one of the rooms into a still life studio.Time
In the beginning it was afternoon, it then became evening and even late nighte before we were done shooting and clearing the room. Not that it made any different to the shot...Lighting
This is a three part multi exposure with different speeds and aperture. The first exposure is to make pumpkin sharp. We used a snoot on a bowen studio strobe to keep from lighting up the background. The lens is stopped down to 32 or 45 and the light is very hard to make it contrasty. Second exposure: This is for the eyes and the sharp parts of the smoke. We used a 120x120cm softbox, again on a bowen studio strobe and to be sure that we didnt create any unwanted shadows. Then we put a nikon sb-800 flash within the pumpkin to create the inner fire look. It didn't want to trigger from the light with the studio strobe from inside the pumpkin so we had to make a hole in the back to bring a cord in. The flash was at about 1/2 effect and the lens was stopped down to 8 or 11. The third exposure was for creating the soft mist that gets its structure from the silk film. Its an 8 seconds exposure the room is dark with only dim modelling light from the same soft box as in exposure two. The lens is wide open.Equipment
It was shot with a Fujifilm gx680, a tilt/shift monster of a middle format camera. It really makes even a mamiya rb67 look small. For some reason, if You dare bring it outdoors, even though it somewhat resembles a vhs video camera from the early 80's, it still inspires people to come up to You asking: "Is that a Hasselblad?" The lens was the fujinon 125/3.2. In small frame talk that would be about the same field of view and depth of field as a 50/1.1 or so. The camera and lens was mounted on a very very sturdy tripod to allow for manipulation of the aperture and time between the exposures. I wouldnt recommend this on a lens with a regular aperture ring or even a dial on the camera. The gx680 lenses luckely have a very handy lever that can be moved without applying very much preassure. Apart from what is mentioned above, we used a smoke machine, a black non-reflective piece of cloth as backround and ofcourse a polaroid back and a remote release, but lets not forget the reflector to fan off all the non wanted smoke between the exposures.Inspiration
Truly, the inspiration was a magic fluke found on the long path of building the scene we were going to shoot. I was going to shoot this very pumpkin with my linhof 13x18 with positive tungsten film and a friend was going to shoot it on negative 120 film. It was however a very complicated shot. Being a poor guys whom cant afford a digital middle format back, we wanted to take a few polaroids before wasting the my precious, no longer availible new, 13x18 tungsten positive sheets. Me and a friend co-owns two gx680 with lots of glass and we used that and a polaroid back to build up the picture, step by step. In the end he was going to shot 6x8 negs and I was aiming for a big back-lit positive on the linhof with odd white balance. When we came to the step where we added the flash inside the pumpkin we were awestuck with surprise as how the pictures came out. We had expected bright eyes, looking like the holes of the mouth. We were also afraid that pointing a flash straight into the lens would create the most horrible of flares. What came out though was, pictures free from artifacts, but with both black and white in the eyes. Thanks you fuji engineers for being so thourough with the lens perfection that one can fire a full power flash straight into it and for being so sloppy with the testing of the fp-100 silk that you didnt notice that the brightest white turns up black as night! At that point we realised that there wa no way we could recreate that on regular film and redirected our efforts to perfect the polaroid instead. Yes, we got to shot the film shots and they turned out ok as well, but the winner of the nights was always going to be a polaroid after that point.Editing
We were very happy with how the instant picture looked, in itself. After scanning it in my (no replaced) canon 9000F scanner my goal was to make it as true to the original as I could. Knowing people will look at pictures on very different kinds of scrrens, I have my lightroom set up to show previews on my matte IPS panel as well as a cheap, low quality monitor and my extreme resolution and high contrast galaxy note screen. Making the pictures look acceptable on all these can be a bit of a challange, but this turned out to be a very forgiving picture. I just adjusted the curves to make it look like the instant picture standing beside the monitors in less than a minute. Removing the dust, on the other hand, was the very opposite of forgiving. The built in dot-pattern of the fp-100 silk makes cloning almost impossible. It does however add a nice flavour to the smoke in this picture. In the end i let most of the dust stay in the picture. I might clean it and wet mount it in my new scanner someday if someone wants to pay for a clean pic, but im not that picky about dust as you can see in my other shots.In my camera bag
Bag? Does anyone really have just one camera bag? I, at least, have for bags, all of them backpacks. * I have one small frame bag, that holds my fuji x gear and a lightweigt 6x9 folder or a ga645w. * I have my large format bag holding my linhof 13x18. Curiously enough, this is actually the smallest of the four. * My bronica sq-ai gear goes into my field middle format bag. * The bag I keep my gx680 in is my studio middle format bag. A national geografics large backpack holding everything i need. Lenses, backs, the camera ofcourse, film, filters, flashes, cords, batteries and so on. The point is not to have to repack, if im in a hurry I can just grab the right kind of gear and be ready to shoot. Well, sometimes I may have unpacked something, but whats in the bags should always be enough for a regular shoot.Feedback
The effect of the burnt out whites turning black is nice to know about. It is easily recreated and most flashguns can trigger it on moderate effect from a few meters away. Beware of flares though, the fujinon lens did the job, but the mamiya 127/4.7 of a polaroid 600se got really bad flares and lost a lot of contrast around the flash. Also buy a good stack of instant film, we ran out of film before we was able to explore all the angles in this shoot!
