Natural light portraits on a cloudy day
December 2020
Emmen, the Netherlands
I made some portraits of my lovely family. Here my mother and my 7 years old daugther.
Asked them to sit down on a chair close to a window.
The camera was set on a tripod and I used a cable release to fire.
Actually this was the first time I used an 16 mm extension tube with my Carl Zeiss Planar 150mm portrait lens. Love the composition you can make with this combination.
The photos where taken in the afternoon on a cloudy winter day so the light from the window was not to bright. Good thing the light was very soft.
To highligh the shadows in the face I bounced back some light with a small reflector.
So keeping the reflector in one hand and pressing the buttom on my cable release in the other hand.
The film was exposed at 1600 ISO and I asked FotoLabKiekie in Amsterdam to developed it at 3200 ISO.
The equipment I used for this very simple setup:
- Hasselblad 500 C/M
- Carl Zeiss T* Planar 150mm f4
- 16mm Extension tube
- Reflector
- Sekonic light meter
- Tripod
- Cable release
- Ilford Delta 3200 120 Rolfilm
- Epson Perfection V550 Photo scanner
- Photoshop CS 6
The negatives are scanned with the following settings in the scan software:
- Document Type: Film
- Film Type: B&W Negative Film
- Image Type: 16-bit Grayscale
- Resolution: 2400 dpi
- Dust Removal: Medium
- DIGITAL ICE Technology: disabled (create ugly patterns)
Post processing was done with Photoshop to remove more dust, little level adjustment and crop.
