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.

I shot the film roll first before picking up the Twins to cover the rest of the session digitally. This wasn’t an intentional decision, but as I reviewed the images later, I noticed that I shot way more with the 10-25mm than with the 25-50mm. I do tend to shoot more with the wider zoom, but it’s not normally so heavily favored. It was like 5:1 this time. I chalk it up to working in a relatively small space and the adequate coverage of the wide-zoom (a 20-50mm in full frame terms) to get what I wanted without having to pick up the longer lens.

So, what did we have to work with? More than usual for a Hong Kong hotel, thankfully. The large window let in plenty of light, and the eye-catching cityscape outside offered the possibilities of shooting with and without the sheer curtains obscuring the concrete jungle. With my back to the window, there was plenty of great light to put Merylin into, both in a chair and in front of or on the bed.

With all of the standard and obvious stuff covered, we ventured away from the safety of daylight and tried a few different things further afield. Hotels almost always have a few mirrors, so I never miss an opportunity to play with them when I shoot. (We did something similar in Merylin’s last shoot, you’ll recall.) Actually, she saw herself in the mirror when she was on the bed and wanted to grab a cheeky self-portrait, which I’ll happily share with you here. (Hopefully she doesn’t mind me passing off her creative work as my own.)

I don’t normally shoot in hotel bathrooms. Let’s just get that out up-front. They usually have no natural light, which is a near deal-breaker for me, and they’re cluttered up with little appliances, fixtures, signs, toiletries, and whatever the model has (understandably) strewn about the various surfaces while she’s, you know, living in that space at the time. I’m quite allergic to having the background of my frames cluttered with crap that I have to move or ask software to remove for me in post.

In the spirit of doing things differently with this shoot, and given that the light was fairly neutral, and the shower had a nice monochrome tile pattern, I thought, “eh, what the hell?” I knew we already had banked some great stuff, so I embraced the wide end of the 10-25mm and got a little crazy with the angles in the shower. Given that there are a couple shots that I liked and I didn’t fall and injure myself or the model, I’m declaring victory.

Merylin isn’t planning to be on my side of the world much anymore, so this might be the last you see of her. Hopefully I gave her a proper send-off.

(Update, 25/10 - She’s a liar and did come to HK again, so we’ve already worked together a third time since this was shot and posted. Expect another full write up!)