She's back! Merylin on film + digital

Shot on a mix of 35mm film and digital, this set offers some new looks of a familiar pretty face.

Hopefully you recognize Merylin, one of the many Ukrainian lasses I’ve had the pleasure of working with before. She’s now the second model I’ve been able to shoot a second time, so I wanted to try something different and not just recapitulate our first shoot. You might think that after my, ahem, less than successful film adventure with Niana, the first model I worked with a second time, I’d be put off that whole concept.

Thankfully you’d be wrong, as I am as stubborn as I am handsome. And modest. Yes, I had a rough go of it when I shot a roll of Portra 800 in that second shoot with Niana, but there are some ready explanations for that calamity. Actually Just one explanation, I guess – it was too dark in that room. It had no natural light at all, and even fast lenses and ISO 800 weren’t enough light-gathering power to give Portra all the photons it wants.

A much better situation with Merylin this time. Not only was I shooting the less-grainy Portra 400 rather than 800, but I rated it at 200 to overexpose it by one stop, and there was still enough light to keep the shutter speeds up. The increased ambient light also made focusing easier and more reliable, as I’m still shooting with just the two EF-mount lenses I have: the 24mm f/1.4L and TTArtisan 75mm f1/.5.

Of course I still managed to screw up a few of them, but there are many more keepers in this roll than in the last one. Best advice if you’re shooting Kodak Portra filmstock, then: bathe it in the best light you can find, and it will treat you well. Ignore this at your peril. This gives me a little bit of confidence to keep swapping film photography into these shoots – it really does add a bit of stylistic variety, and the fact that each press of the shutter has a particular cost associated with it (I’d calculate it to be about 70 cents a frame in America bucks, given what I pay for film and developing here) really makes me slow down and try to get it right. If you’ve never shot film before, it’s worth it just as a tool for sharpening up your attention to composition and exposure.

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Merylin, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.