Susan on 8x10.

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Maris
Posts: 882
Joined: 27 Jul 2012, 16:02
Location: Noosa

Susan on 8x10.

Postby Maris » 26 Jan 2013, 11:48

How do you photograph a busy, dedicated artist?
First get them out of the studio and into the garden. At least there will be enough light for a tolerably short exposure.
Then sit them down on a turned kitchen chair. The back of the chair offers support for the subject who is enjoined not to move. And it is a passably comfortable place to wait while I fuss with focussing and exposure arithmetic. A quiet ciggie helps calm the nerves.
The back of the camera was swung to angle the focus plane through the subject who was not sitting square to the camera. This angled focus plane just catches the end of the wooden rail at the right hand edge of the picture.
Exposure and processing were routine. Here is the result:

Image
Susan
Gelatin-silver photograph on Kodak Polymax Fine Art VC FB photographic paper, image size 19.5cm X 24.6cm, from a 8x10 Tmax 100 large format negative exposed in a Plaubel Profia monorail view camera fitted with a 10 inch Commercial Ektar lens.
Titled, signed, and stamped verso.
Susan is an artist. Her aircraft pictures are famous.

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Alastair Moore
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Location: Darwin, Australia
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Re: Susan on 8x10.

Postby Alastair Moore » 26 Jan 2013, 12:05

Very nice, Maris! How long was the exposure for?

Walter Glover
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Joined: 31 Jul 2012, 22:31
Location: Leichhardt, NSW

Re: Susan on 8x10.

Postby Walter Glover » 26 Jan 2013, 14:32

It is amazing how alien cigarettes and associated bits and pieces have become.

It seems to lack some of the sparkle that other prints of yours have Maris.
Walter Glover

"We see things not as they are. We see them as we are."
Emanuel Kant

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Maris
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Joined: 27 Jul 2012, 16:02
Location: Noosa

Re: Susan on 8x10.

Postby Maris » 26 Jan 2013, 15:01

Camera exposure was 1/2 second at f11 on an overcast day. Soft daylight makes for easy portrait lighting and delivers sympathetic skin tones (borderline flattering) on someone who was chain smoking through too many late nights trying to get an exhibition into a wall-ready state. At the bottom of the chair leg is a part empty cup of dynamite espresso coffee. It has been said half jokingly that an artist is a machine for turning beer, pizza, coffee, and cigarettes into masterpieces.
The Commercial Ektar lens is very sharp stopped down a bit and it is possible with a magnifier to do a thread count analysis of the artist's faded Levis.
In the studio the exposure would have been 4 seconds at the Ektar's maximum aperture; a blistering f6.3. I reckon no one, not even a well motivated sitter, can stay really still, not breathe, not blink, for that long.


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