Jen

Mamiya C330, f/2.8 at 1/30th of a second with Fuji ISO 400 color negative film.


Taken with a Mamiya C330 TLR (medium format film camera), this looks slightly different than the normal sharp and clear results this camera is known for. Visually, it has more in common with a cheap Holga camera. Why?

The simple answer is 'It's a digital photograph of a negative'. Rather than trundle over to the university and spend 20 minutes waiting for the flatbed film scanner to do its job, I simply put a strobe with a shoot-through umbrella on a stand (the umbrella was used to diffuse the strobe, otherwise there'd be un-even lighting on the negative), held the negative up and took a picture. Then imported into Photoshop, and used curves to render the negative as a positive, with a few other adjustment layers for color balance and vibrance.

The fact that the negative wasn't perfectly flat when photographed makes the lower left corner darker than it should be, and the strobe probably made it more grainy looking than a flatbed light would have.

All in all though, it works.

Self Portrait In CTO

A rather interesting technique I blatantly borrowed from the Strobist blog takes advantage of a fun feature oft overlooked in digital cameras - white balance. Most of the time, all people care about is that what is white in front of them comes out white in the picture, rather than shades of orange or blue.

Why not take the mid-day sun, and turn it into what looks mid-night? So I set the camera white balance set to 2,500 Kelvin (very blue), then aperture dialed down to f16 to make noon sunlight look like late evening (a small aperture makes things dimmer).

Then I grabbed my strobe (a SB-800 at 1/2), put it on a stand, pointed down at my face. The strobe was fitted with a full CTO (color to orange) gel, which given the white balance, came out as the equivalent of white light.

A little selective desaturation in photoshop and wham! Spiffy new self portrait.