Polish Models on 35mm

Matthew Osborne Photography / Mr Leica

September 2016

In contrast to my last few model photography trips where I packed big lights, light modifiers, light stands, monopod, medium format film cameras, medium format digital cameras, a mass of batteries, chargers, memory cards, big bag of 120 black and white film and 120 colour film I thought I needed to get back to basics.

Camera Bag

For this trip I had the digital Leica M240 plus Leica Noctilux 50mm f1.0 lens, the analog Leica M6 plus 1950s Leica Summicron 50 f2 DR lens, the compact Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f1.4 lens for if I need a wider angle and then the tiny 1960s Olympus Pen-F half frame camera.

I planned to shoot black and white film in the Leica M6 and used a 35mm bulk film loader to roll myself some Kodak Plus X film to bring. I hope the lower contrast look of the film will add to the vintage and less perfect look of the photos. I brought the Olympus Pen-F to shoot some colour film as the weather forecast was blue skies some days. I loaded a roll of 35mm Fuji Provia 100f E6 slide film which I bought in B&H, New York when I did my second workshop there in January. The half frame gives me 72 shots from a standard 36 exposure film roll.

The film photos are to please me and the digital Leica M240 photos are to give to the models to use for their portfolios. The digital camera is also great to warm up the models and for a preview to show them the look I am going for. I metered all film photos with the M240 as I just replicate the same settings on the film cameras, using the M240 in M mode. To keep it simple and for a change I used available light for all except one shoot where I also used my speedlight to boost light levels.

Models

As with most of my model photography trips I looked forward to catching up with familiar faces but also to work with a few new models too. I had the usual multiple cancellations for a variety of reasons but overall we did well. The models that did meet on the whole gave 110% effort and almost all had made personal sacrifices to be able to meet me making them even more focused to have a great shoot.