March 02, 2003

L_ & Elisabeth Indoors

Digital original
After the success of the images made on New Year's Day, I was keen to return to L_, Elisabeth and Krista's apartment once the days were brighter, and see what the possibilities were with the 8"x10" camera. Two months later, I thought the details had been worked out, and I ventured back to the apartment. Unfortunately, while L_ and Elisabeth were available to model, communication broke down with Krista, so as opposed to a revisiting of the New Year's Day session, I changed the plans to a two-model session.

Fortunately, while the three model sessions plans had to be modified, the other factor, the weather, was in my favour. I couldn't have asked for better light, with the sky filled with light clouds that let the sun shine through intermittently.
Digital original
When I first worked with colour transparency film, starting in March 2000, I quickly fell in love with Fuji's Astia, a beautiful film specifically designed for skin-tones. When Fuji pulled the product from the Canadian market in 2002, I was at a loss, for no other colour transparency film gave me the tones that Astia provided. With this image, however, I see hope in the digital medium, as it took very little effort to match the skin-tone of L_ and Elisabeth. I hope this indicates that I will not be leaving colour photography behind, as more and more products are swept away by the inevitable digital tide.

The rest of the session was spent working alternately with a digital camera I was testing and my view camera. Working between these two very different tools emphasized two things; first how different the working process can be, depending on the equipment being used, and how little the tools being used mattered to the success of their use, as long as the relative strengths and weaknesses can be used to advantage.
8"x10" film
With the smaller digital camera, I could sketch quickly, making images that had potential, without expending limited resources (I can only take a dozen or so sheets of 8"x10" film per session), and then bring the larger, slower view camera into play when a particularly striking image was in the making. This is much the way I work with infra-red film, but added the element of colour, which is normally not a medium I work in. The dance between the digital camera and the 8"x10" was one that worked surprisingly well, with a great number of images being made as possibilities, and a select few compositions being created with the film camera.

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