I've been absolutely flat out. I was having trouble finding people to pose for these so I put out some fliers and about a month later finally got a phone call from a local band who wanted a promo shoot (you can hear their sample track here: https://soundcloud.com/s-l-o-w-m-u-s-i- ... t-midnight ... I really like it )
. I shot them and then all of a sudden my phone has been ringing off the hook. I've had people almost throwing themselves at me to get their portrait shot.
Things are picking up at such a pace it's really hard to keep up. Varnishing, scanning, shooting, cleaning, chemical maintenance... it's so overwhelming. A lot of them don't understand there are still hours of work outside of studio doing silver maintenance, mixing up new developer or collodion, scanning plates, all the rest of it... it's been so much fun but this week has been exhausting. Not to mention the frustration of running into chemical problems mid-shoot whilst someone is sitting there expecting magic! Although I'm probably being way too hard on myself and setting my standards too high at this early a stage. I probably look at too much work from the masters and expect myself to be that good, that's probably a good and a bad thing. I'm still new to this and just need to work at my own pace, and need to repeat that mantra.
Here are a few iphone pics and scans of some plates I've done the last couple/few weeks
all 8x10s on black glass
^
Tried a triptych but wasn't happy with focal length and development. Will try to do that again next week sometime.
The tonal range in the iphone pics is rubbish and not representative of how they look in the flesh. Even the scans aren't as good as the real thing.
I hate scanning the things.
I've also done a few landscapes here and there but no scans of those... I'm just starting to get over some chemical and technique issues and starting to get things into a really nice flow. So many things that can go wrong. You iron out one problem and two more pop up somewhere else... still I am having an absolute blast. This is so much fun and so rewarding when you watch that image turn to a positive in the fixer and the reaction of the sitter is priceless. Pure magic.
Studio stuff is pretty new to me and presents it's own challenges. I'm having a lot of trouble getting the lighting I want so a lot of the time I go for a really generic pose. I've tried different lighting methods but always run into problems with shadows where I don't want them to be or too much flat light on the face... all stuff I'm sure I'll figure out with practice. Getting people to sit dead still even with my rickety head brace is really hard so I never quite get "tack sharp" images but they are acceptable (they are a lot sharper than they look in these iphone pics). Some strobe lighting would be awesome but don't know if I'm ready to make that investment yet.
I got some rubylith sheeting so I'm going to red-out the back window of my van to make my mobile darkroom a bit brighter so I can see what I'm doing a bit more .using a head torch is a pain.
Good fun!