Slow portraits with Elle
Over the years, I’ve worked with Elle for workshops and a couple of commercial jobs. But most often we’ve worked together simply for the love of photography. She’s always game if I want to test out an idea, a technique or a piece of equipment. This shoot was a bit of a mix of things to test out (a lens, an approach, and another piece of kit) and just getting used to portrait photography again now that Covid-restrictions are slowly being lifted.
For my fellow photography nerds: the lens I was testing is the Fujinon GF45-100mm F4. A slow-ish, standard zoom usually doesn’t get a photographer’s heart beating any faster. But I really want a lens that I can use for pretty much all my corporate, editorial and commercial portrait work. I haven’t shot with it enough to give you a comprehensive result but I’m very impressed so far. It’s sharp, the AF is one of the best I’ve seen on the GFX50R/S and the OIS is really good (makes up for the slower F-stop than say, the GF63mm when shooting handheld). I still kind of miss the “purity” of a prime lens but with the current state of the industry it makes a lot more sense to spend the little available cash on one zoom, than on a set of primes.
I’ve also wanted to test out shooting on a tripod even when the light, nor the subject asks for it. I still fight the tripod at times but I find that a tripod in combination with an unforgiving big sensor makes me slow down and create better work. It makes me consider composition and settings first, so that I can fully concentrate on the model afterwards.
The four pictures below were lit with a mix of ambient light and a flash (Godox v1) through a simple white umbrella.
A while ago, I wrote about my experiments with a haze machine. In the mean time, I’ve tripped a smoke alarm in an AirBnB and used it for an improvised grunge party with the kids, but I haven’t had the chance to use it for portrait shoots. That’s until this shoot. I’m mainly interested in the subtle application of haze. A bit of haze was added in all the above pictures. But when I saw the blinds in Elle’s room, I couldn’t resist placing a flash outside and crank up the hazer.
For this shot, I added a second flash (Godox V1) to light Elle’s face.
Strong back light (without much front light) with a lot of haze isn’t an easy task for any AF system. So no surprise that the GFX50R struggled to find focus every now and then. But I find this image even more interesting out of focus. I wish I could say it was a deliberate choice, but I’ll take a happy accident when I see one too.
This was just a short shoot and at the end we made some last pictures with my vintage Minolta Rokkor 58mm F1.4 lens. It doesn’t come close, not by 1.000 miles, to the technical quality of the native GF glass. But man, I remain in love with the look that this 50 EUR E-Bay lens gives me on the GFX.
Feel free to let me know in the comments what you think of this set.