But for some reason I didn't get board, and we didn't start to slack off at all! I can think of a few reasons...
First, even though it's slow, shooting with a 4x5 is very deliberate. Every, absolutely everything, you do has to have a purpose and has to be thought out. There's no winging it and then chimping (looking at the back of the camera) to see what you did wrong. It has be right the first time. So there's an element of purpose or pressure or something in there, making all the mental calculations, trying to visualize the lighting, all that.
Speaking of lighting, that was a major challenge, and quite entertaining. We used a mixture of hot and stone lighting, which had to be metered independently and then combined together. First, I usually did the strobe metering, this is because it will dictate what the f stop will be, and from there you set your shutter speed for the hot lights. Remember, strobes don't care what you shutter does. They only care about your ISO and aperture.
So say I got a reading of f16 for the strobe. That mean at f16, the strobe will properly expose the subject where I took the reading. But then say I have two hot lights behind me, only lighting my hair, and the opposite side of my face. How do I meter for those so that they are equal to the strobe? You set your aperture to f16, not fire the strobe, and then the meter will tell you the shutter. Easy as pie, or is it cake?
This is all beside the point though...because the photo for tonight is not from the 4x5, it's from my phone. It's taken of the ground glass, which is the back glass on the camera where you compose the image before you put the film holder in. I had two hot lights on either side of Matt for the picture we were taking, and I just decided that I wanted to get a picture of what I saw. My phone did an excellent job...
of making a terrible photo. True, it was horrible light conditions, but still, that phone is not sharp at allllll. It shot a ISO2000 for crying out loud.
But anyway, I had a photo that I liked. On to editing, in Snapseed of course. First things first, get all the color out in an attempt to hide the noise. SO much noise. B/w helped a bit. Then I did my normal edits, ambience up, shadows up, contrast up a bit, just overall try to improve the tonal range and the details that got lost in dark shadow or bright highlights. Not too much I could pull out though, since it's a compressed jpeg and not great to begin with.
Then I just said screw it, and went crazy. I went full HDR on it, which destroyed the quality. But oh well! Then to got further, I did a center blur and vignetting a bit, also cropping things down a ton. It's probably half the size as the original.
To put the final touches on it, I used the shuffle mode in Retrolux filter to get some crazy light leaks and what not going on. Just gave me a few different looks that I liked.
Finally, in Ps, I put all four versions I created onto one photo, so you can see them all at once.
See you tomorrow!
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