I liked this composition because it incorporates some humanity, a deviation from some of the other photos where the soldier stands alone. Several of the images stood out: For one photo, the team decided to hang a pair of the pants from a vintage vehicle at the museum, even sourcing period-correct clothespins for the setup.Īnother image features two soldiers on break playing cards inside a transport carrier. With digital, you can make as many photos as you need, so I found it easiest to start with the digital images, and once I’d hit upon the ideal composition, I’d shoot some photos with the film camera. The shoot was go-go-go (like most commercial projects) we had an hour for each setup. I used the black flags as a negative fill to suck some of the light out of the side of the face, and I used the fresnel as a punchy source or eye light, with the light fully flooded so it didn’t spot and lent a natural look and a bit of direction. But this was an ad shoot, and the light and the time of day wouldn’t always be perfect, so I used a few subtle light sources: one Zylight F8 LED Fresnel and some black flags. Obviously, during WWII and the Korean War, photographers mostly relied on natural light to make their photos they weren’t lugging around lights while on deployment.
Empowered by the fast Tri-X film, many photographers of that time were making clean images. If you look at vintage war photos from the Korean War era, most are not over-the-top grainy like you might think. The Tri X 400 has a bit of grit to it, but it’s subtle, which is appropriate. It also allowed me to use larger film that would match up nicely with my digital images made with a Phase One XF + IQ250 digital back, and despite the different aspect ratio, it allowed the formats to be cohesive. This camera allowed me to shoot multiple exposures on one roll, so I didn’t have to shoot one frame at a time. So I went with a film used during both wartime eras-Tri X 400 black-and-white Kodak film in 120 format-and loaded it into a vintage Rolleicord DBP DBGM twin lens reflex camera. While I don’t know a tremendous amount about the history behind these developments, I do know that in creating a faux-vintage photo, the film you use is more important than the camera. By the 1950s, cameras had seen improvements: They loaded similar styles of film, but the advancing was easier and you could shoot multiple exposures. A lot of the cameras that were around during WWII were not the advanced pieces of hardware we know today-they were slow and they couldn’t load much film. The photos were meant to harken back to both the WWII and the Korean War eras, but obviously between the 1940s and the 1950s cameras changed. That made it easier for me to replicate the grain patterns and the tonality in the curve, color grade, and the retouching in my digital versions.ĭeciding on the appropriate vintage camera and film for the project took some research and required some compromise. Plus, using film meant I would have a real-life example of what a photo might have looked like during that time period. On the other hand, using exclusively digital photography and adding a grain effect in post felt like a shortcut. If I messed it up on film, there was no going back. Plus, advertising shoots are fast-moving, high-pressure, and costly, so there’s no room for mistakes. Using only film would have been risky - I’m one of these stooges from the digital age that doesn’t have extensive experience with film photography, and I was flying in from another shoot in Sierra Leone the day before this one, so I wouldn’t have time to practice with the vintage camera before the work began.
0 kommentar(er)
