A SOFT TOUCH IN LEIPZIG - WITH 35mm

Sometimes I just need a really soft touch and no matter how good I am with editing, I can’t get what I need with a digital camera.

Medium format analog works pretty well, but nothing like 35mm with its hazy, grainy, dreamy feel. Digital and medium format are just too high quality for that. Enter 35mm…

These also needed to be colour and the colour I had in my mind also can’t be achieved (by me) using digital. MF analog maybe, but still there is something special about the colour of certain films when shot with 35mm.

The film is Kodak GC 400, which is a generic name for Kodak Ultramax, which you can buy very easily around the world. It’s like a consumer type film, cheaper and not nearly as ‘perfect’ as Portra, for example. Camera was my Nikon F100 using a 50mm cheap f1.8. Most shots were shot around f1.8 to f2.2. Having said all that about 35mm, the first 3 shots were taken with the Pentax 67.

There was light reflecting off this beautiful old mirror which sat behind the vanity table, adorned with finely coloured and constructed glass and crystal perfume bottles. I tried to use this reflected mirror light as the main light source and the backlight to create the dreaminess. It was a difficult balance, especially without a preview image on the camera. The Sekonic L-608 meter helped a lot here. Being able to take multiple readings around the composition and lock each one in so that you can see the exact spread of light in the scene is very valuable. Being able to see the ‘strength’ of the reflected mirror light which I wanted to use as the primary light was also useful - it wasn’t strong to say the least.

Are the images ‘sharp’? No, but if they were, the effect I wanted would not have been achieved.

I only shot a few images actually, they were the last few on the roll and I just didn’t feel like they were working so didn’t bother loading another roll. t was also getting dark quickly and I was already shooting down as low as 1/4s on two of them. I think I posted one of them somewhere previously but I had to edit that lab scan intensively. These are my own scans and they are barely edited other than to adjust the spread of tones (using curves) to replicate the brightness I saw with my eye and measured on the meter.

These images were shot during a very inspired day long shooting marathon where we shot many different concepts from this to nude and beyond. The BNB itself was amazing, maybe that’s what inspired us to shoot all day and into the evening. We would definitely go back there and become absorbed and enveloped by its charm and majesty again.