Photo courtesy of Pictor Photo Archives. Shot on Film and scanned onto Kodak PhotoCD
Here is the first shot for the new Shot On Film category of Picture & Sound. The picture is numbered #00001 which means the first image on the first PhotoCD in the library. I dug this disc out of the media vault just a few days ago.
The model was a 16- or 17-year-old girl who was pursuing a modeling career with the help of her mother. We hired a pro makeup artist for the shoot.
Production Notes
Back in the days of film, we had to write down notes in a notebook for all our shot. Although we did this for this every photoshoot, the notebooks have since disappeared. Maybe they will turn up someday, but I doubt it. So we don’t have all the technical details. I can say that it was shot in a small studio in downtown Austin, Texas back in 1993, probably in the fall during the school year.
Lighting was a Paul Buff White Lighting 1200 strobe light with Chimera medium softbox that was placed horizontally above the camera. A mirror was placed below the model to reflect light up under the hat. The background was white seamless paper lit by two strobes with umbrellas. I would guess it was f/11 or f/16 @ 1/500. I always liked shooting with small apertures. I remember shooting this on 120 print film with a Hasselblad 500CM using a chrome Zeiss 150mm lens.
It’s funny how you can remember the setup even 15 years later. Maybe that’s because I used the same setup many times. Yeah, I’m not very experimental. I found a formula that worked and stuck with it. Why re-invent the wheel every time?
Post Production
The scan was from a 35mm slide dupe that I made from the negative. Back then, I shot most fashion and beauty shots with the Hasselblad. Then I made slide dupes from the medium format negatives. The original format was square, but it had to be cropped for 35mm. I like the square format of the Hasselblad. The picture can be cropped optically for horizontal or vertical depending on the end use.
The PhotoCD Image file was converted to JPEG using Adobe Photoshop CS2. There were no adjustments made to the image; the file was converted in a batch process from Adobe Bridge. The only thing added was the watermark logo and the image was resized for the web. When this photograph was first used many years ago, there was all kinds of Photoshop work done with it. For various reasons today I try to avoid image manipulation.
To Dust Spot or Not To Dust Spot…
…that is the question. There is white dust spot on the picture that could easily be removed. Before digital photography and the internet I would always dust spot prints with dye and a brush. It took practice and skill to get the color to match. Today, with Photoshop, it is so easy to use the clone tool to get rid of spots and blemishes a monkey could do it.
But that dust spot resulted from a real physical speck that was on the slide during scanning. It is more than just a bit in the computer’s memory, it is evidence of something molecular. It could be organic. Maybe it is a bit of pollen or a colony of dustmites. For all I know it could be a miniature alien spaceship that landed on my slide. Dust exists in the real world. Perhaps there was a reason that dust speck was there. We’ll never know. But whatever it was, the fact is it was there. Removing it would be like rewriting history.
OK, I decided to remove the dustspots in Lightroom.
