Last week, I did a portrait shoot with Susanna Brasca, a model from Taipei with a Taiwanese mother and Italian father. I came across her on Instagram when she appeared in the feeds of some photographers I either know or follow.
The kind of shoot we did is known as a test or TFP (Time For Print). These are generally a mutually beneficial exchange of photos between photographer and model and sometimes also make-up artist, hair stylist or fashion stylist. Basically all parties work for free to build their portfolios, explore ideas or look to see if those involved might be able to collaborate professionally in the future.
I don’t often do these kind of shoots, but I thought it would be fun to put a few rolls of black and white film through my Hasselblad and scout the Long Museum down on West Bund in Shanghai as a potential location for other photo shoots.
I like to keep portraits simple and prefer natural light over strobes. Fortunately we had an unusually clear weekday, so not only was the late afternoon/early evening light great, but the location wasn’t as crowded as it usually is on weekends.
Still, we had to compete with a few other shoots: some guy was doing a shoot with a product, there was a wedding shoot and a model with a coterie of septuagenarian amateur shooters blasting away. By the time the light really started getting good (around 5pm) pretty much everyone had left for dinner.
The original idea was to just do the shoot on black and white film. I could easily have just done the whole shoot with my Nikon D850, but I like the fact that shooting with my Hasselblad makes me slow down the process and think more about each frame. I only get 12 images out of each magazine so I need to make them count and think about what’s going to work or not.
I’ve mostly shot Kodak Tri-X black and white film in the past, but when I dropped by the shop where I buy my film at Xingguang, Shanghai’s multi-level camera market, I thought I’d take a punt on Ilford HP5 Plus instead. I also picked up some more rolls of Ilford Delta 3200, a film I really like, especially in medium format. These days, the price of Ilford film seems to about the best black and white bang for your buck. Maybe Brexit and the plummeting pound has something to do with this.
Ilford Delta 3200 is an interesting film. It’s rated at 3200 ASA, but the native ASA is more like 1000. In my experience, I get good results shooting it between 1000 to 1600 and having it developed at 3200. Apparently it’s possible to push process this film up to 6400, but I haven’t tried that. It seems that it is pretty hungry for light and the less light you give it the more intense the film grain. I really like the heavy grain of this film when shot on medium format, but it’s a bit too intense for me in 35mm.
I haven’t shot much with HP5 Plus apart from some expired rolls that had suffered a bit with age. I’m happy with the results I got from this shoot with HP5 though. Like the Delta 3200, it handles over exposure really well. HP5 is not particularly contrasty, but of course it’s easy to add contrast in post. I like the look I get from this film for portraits. It has nice grain and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly sharp film.
On the whole, the comparative lack of sharpness between film and digital is one reason why I tend to prefer it over digital. The extreme ‘forensic’ sharpness of modern digital sensors and modern lenses is, in my opinion, not the most flattering way to photograph humans. I don’t need or want to see every pore in someone’s face.
This is the same reason why a lot of directors of photography are teaming their modern digital cameras with old lenses, which have a lot less sharpness than modern ones. For instance, the return series of Twin Peaks was apparently shot on digital with 1950s movie camera lenses.
A few days before the shoot, Susanna asked me what my ideas were. I was pretty vague and just said the theme was ‘hot summer’ since it was going to be about 30C and humid, like Shanghai always is. I also said I wanted to play with shadows and light after watching a few old film noir movies from the 1940s lately. I think I might have had some ideas from all those black and white celebrity profile shoots I used to see in Rolling Stone magazine back in the 1990s, but I didn’t come up with a mood board of inspirational images. That’s something I’ll only do when a client requests it. I prefer to just spend time with the subject, see what the light is doing and see what I think the best way to photograph them is.
I also I told Susanna that she was welcome to bring any ideas to the shoot, for example if she was looking for a particular type of shot for a model comp card or whatever. She asked me what to wear and I told her to wear whatever she likes, but it’s going to be warm.
Since it was looking like such a nice day, I thought I may as well shoot some colour, so I grabbed two rolls of Provia 100F slide film from my fridge: one in 120 (medium format) and the other in 35mm. I really like shooting with this high contrast colour film and I’ll probably blog about it at a later stage. The 35mm went into my Nikon F100, which is a lot more like shooting with a DSLR than the old Hasselblad.
Anyway, in the end I was happy when I got the film and scans back from Sdodo who runs one of the labs I most often use in Shanghai. My initial edit was around 85 of the 100 shots we did, pretty evenly distributed between colour and black and white.
Susanna was easy to work with and didn’t need much direction. One slight issue was her white t-shirt which blasted reflected light back into the camera in some situations. This was more an issue with the Provia, due to its narrow exposure latitude, but I still think that when you have good light you can’t beat the look of colour slide film. As for the location, it’s a certainly a great place to shoot with no tall buildings around to block the afternoon sun, reflective surfaces, geometric shadows late in the day, different textures and a lot of well-worn industrial type concrete that reminded me a bit of Berlin.
I’ve made a little web gallery from the shoot. I’m curious as to whether people prefer the black and white or the colour. I think some situations were suited better to others, so I’m kind of on the fence on this.
More photography at www.davetacon.com
