I’ve always wanted more opportunities to practice portrait photography but most of my friends aren’t eager to jump in front of the camera. Normally I just try to sneak some candids/documentary styles when I’m hanging out with people. So I was looking forward to attending my first Seattle Snap event. It seemed like a great opportunity to get in touch with the community and practice the craft.
My first impression of the event was that it was more well run and organized than I expected. They managed to secure a hotel as a venue, with 3 dedicated rooms as well as a changing/gear room for use. A DJ booth was set up in the lobby and free water and coffee was offered to all attendees. I was really impressed that this event was free!
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Intros were made and we quickly dove into things. It got a little chaotic which was intimidating to me since I had never been to these events before. But there was a good ratio of models to photographers which meant that there was plenty of opportunity to go around.
I quickly fell into a strategy of being the unofficial second (or third) shooter. It was nice to be able to watch more experienced photographers and models work and interact with each other. I didn’t feel any pressure to direct or take initiative; I could just watch the scene unfold and focus on taking pictures.
One thing I realized quickly on was that I was at a disadvantage with my manual focus lens. I normally shoot by myself and tend to forget that shooting with manual focus is not the norm anymore. What made it even more difficult was that I was shooting wide open (at the maximum aperture) which makes it even harder to nail focus, since the depth of field gets narrower as you open the lens up. It takes more time for me to take each picture since I need to first hit focus, recompose, and then click the shutter. Most people with modern camera and lenses just compose and click without worrying about whether things are in focus.
As a result, I felt like I was scrambling to catch up with the other photographers, who were able to snap multiple pictures in succession before the model changed poses. In the meantime I barely had enough time to take one or two pictures. I also had to throw out a good portion of them because I missed focus and the faces were too blurry.
Why do I bother with such outdated technology? Well, several reasons… the first is that manual focus lenses tend to be much smaller than their autofocus counterparts. Much easier to carry around and use. The second reason is that older lenses have certain vintage characters that many people (including myself) find really desirable. These vintage characteristics are traditionally seen as optical defects that modern lenses correct. But sometimes people long for these nostalgic shortcomings. For example, adding artificial film grain to digital images (which I myself am guilty of)! Older lenses are all fully manual focus. The lens I was using today to take all these pictures was built in the late 1970s. I own a mixture of modern and vintage lenses (don’t ask me, I know I have a problem) and I find myself gravitating towards my vintage lenses more for their rendering.
Vintage lenses can be great for portraits because they aren’t as sharp and unforgiving as modern lenses. Skin tones are smoothed over and can retain a subtle glow due to spherical aberrations. There are lots of filters, such as Tiffen Black Pro-Mist which do very similar things. To my knowledge these filters are very popular for use in fashion and portrait photographer. Sometimes if a lens is too “good” it can be really harsh on the face. Models will not be happy if your pictures show every single pore and imperfection on their face!
I couldn’t help but sneak a couple of candids, I think documentary type photography is still my favorite to shoot.
I shot all these with digital camera but the astute reader will notice that a lot of them are black and white. As you may have noticed from previous posts I’ve been shooting a lot of black and white film lately. I really like the look of black and white and can’t help but showcase a lot of these pictures in that style. I tend to want to do these especially with indoor pictures. I feel like indoor colors usually don’t inspire me and I like to convert it to black and white. But this is just my personal preference! The beauty (or curse) of digital is that you get the choice. Not for the indecisive!
I’m always looking for willing models so if you’d like me to take some portraits of you I’d happily oblige. Just reach out!