Content warning: very mild nudity.
Without putting an age-verification gate on my entire website (I do not want to deal with all of that so please don’t make me deal with all of that), below there are some nipples in photos.
If you’re not the legal age for viewing things like that, wherever you are in the world, ya gotta scoot on out of here pls.
Do not ever even think of @-ing me about this.
It’s definitely been a while since writing blog posts. As much as I’d like to say it’s because nobody reads blogs anymore because it’s not 2009, it’s mostly because I’m very lazy and there’s always been more pressing things to do. Riveting start, right?
Anyway, I was thinking I’d give this another go to show off some of the film I’ve been shooting. I do share a little bit of my work on instagram, but it’s only ever a very small fraction of the work I shoot (see above for laziness).
These shots are from a studio shoot in late 2019. My first shoot in a studio, actually. Though I’ve been taking portraits for a good few years, I was a bit nervous about this day; my equipment to date hasn’t exactly been ~*cutting edge tech*~ (my go-to speedlight is a Nikon SB-700 I got as a teenager and have dropped so many times that its structural integrity is mostly relying on sticky tape), so working with some big ol’ studio strobes, light stands and boom arms was… daunting. Doubly daunting was the fact that this was my first shoot where I’d paid a model for their time and the kicker that directing people in front of the camera is probably where I’m weakest (still). It was a nerve-wracking drive in.
Thankfully, the lovely folks at Studio Brunswick (sadly, now closed) helped to run me through all the equipment and how it worked moments before Shay/Peyote, the model for the morning, rocked up to shoot. Shai was so great to chat with about photography and modelling and it made the shoot really fun and probably one of the biggest days of learning I’ve had since starting out in photography.
I’ll share some of the digital photos in a follow-up post, but I wanted to share some of the film I shot on the day first - thanks to Jesse Beecher for prompting me to get back into this! Check out their work here or check out their Twitter here.
Equipment used:
Nikon F5
Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 G2 lens
Sigma 35mm f/1.4 ART lens
Film used
Kodak Portra 800 film
Cinestill 800T film
(As a small aside, these rolls - and just about everything I shoot nowadays - were developed at Hillvale in Brunswick)
These photos below were taken at the very end of our four-hour shoot in the studio. Once we had a play around with different lighting setups, costume changes and lenses, we shot a few portraits in the natural light on film before wrapping up the shoot and Shay hit the road.
Cinestill 800T
This was my first time shooting Cinestill film and I am absolutely in love with how this roll came out. You’re meant to shoot this film under very warm tungsten light (hence the T in the name of the film), but shooting this roll in the late morning light came up with some really nice results! In terms of the colours this film gives you, the walls of the studio were very, very white and came up in a lovely shade of blue.
Kodak Portra 800
So Kodak Portra 400 is my favourite film. It’s almost-definitely over-hyped but it’s just a lovely film stock to shoot and I shot so many rolls when I was learning how to use film on a trip to New York in 2015-16, so there’s a whooooole lot of sentimentality when I shoot it now (and because I’m so bloody slow shooting film, I still have four rolls left over from that New York trip. Let’s not talk about that). Similar to the Cinestill 800T, this was my first time shooting with Portra 800 - partially because it’s pricey, partially because I’m still working through that hoard of Portra 400.
Anyway, the higher sensitivity on the film made shooting in the studio a breeze; it wasn’t the brightest place to be shooting in the middle of the room (which was easy when shooting digital and using the strobes I booked) but the strong light coming in through the window meant it was pretty easy to get a well-exposed portrait without opening up apertures too wide or getting a slow shutter speed and potentially ruining some photos. The warmer tones in these images are bloody lovely and here’s a few of my favourite shots from the roll.
As I mentioned above, this was my very, very first experience shooting film in a studio, but working with a professional model and having the assistance of the folks at the studio made the day such a breeze.
I learned a lot about directing models, using studio lights, shaping light with big ol’ soft-boxes and the importance of checking your settings on equipment (I’ll go into that with the digital shots).
With these film shots, I got a really good example of how different film stocks work in a neutral setting with natural light. I’m keen to give more film a go in the studio with some lights set up next time and will share the results when I eventually give that a crack. It’s also nice revisiting these shots a year on and finally getting to share some of my work from that day!
If you liked these photos and somehow made it here without having me on social media, I’d love it if you could zip on over to my Instagram and give it a lil’ follow.
Have a great day! Thanks so much for reading!
p.s. I’m sure that when I look at this tomorrow, I’ll notice a million typos but I hope my lack of proof-reading doesn’t take away from some nice images!