available light outdoors

[peter_koning1]

I'm a year into LF now and enyoing it a lot. All the tips and tricks posted by this forum members were an enormous help. A friend visited me this weekend and when he saw something of my B&W stuff, he asked me if I could take some pictures of him and his girlfriend. NO studiowork but outdoor with available light. In color. Thats my problem! I have no experience with color but I like to try it. I,m not going to process the film myself but take it to a profi-lab.

I,m only having a starters outfit that is; cambo sc-2;210 mm lens;My questions are: what film to use; can my 210 mm do the job;what other things do I need. all tips and advises are welcome.

[mike_mahoney]

Why use the LF for portraits ? It's somewhat overkill, expensive, and

not required unless your friends require huge enlargements.

 

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Do you and your friends a favour and use 35mm with Portra NC 160 or

400 in the shade, or in brighter light with a little fill flash. For

the price of five developed sheets you could easily shoot a full roll

of Portra, and have room for more poses and misses.

 

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Don't want to discourage you, but sheet film and experimentation can

become tiresome and expensive - and 35mm can do the job quite well.

[scott_walton2]

Sure, the 210 will do fine for full lengths, 3/4 but would be for a

head and shoulders a 240-360 would give better compression. The 210 is

a "slight" tele for 4x5 so it will look good. As far as color, Shoot

some of the 400 Portra. It has a great tonal range, grain is small and

tight and it will give a good usable shutter speed. Take the care

shooting the color as you would your B/W and you will be fine. What I

would do... have the couple posing with their back to the sun so you

get a rim light around their heads and match the exposure by using a

strobe to fill in the face nicely. Works great!

[noshir_patel]

Portra 400 in 4x5 sounds like a reasonable choice. I've never tried

it. I think it's too grainy for 35mm use, however (unless you like

that sort of thing). I shot several rolls of it (mostly snapshots)

and was glad when it was gone...

[david_hall6]

Peter,

 

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If you are going to use the view camera, you might as well use it for

its benefits, otherwise it really would just be overkill:

 

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Use a short depth of field. Shoot at 5.6 or whatever your lens is

wide open. Put one subject in front of the other or slightly closer

than the other if they're side by side, and use tilt or swing to

bring the eyes of both in to perfectly sharp focus. Play with the

hyperfocal distance so that ONLY their eyes are in focus.

 

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Two great ideals of large format portraiture are Richard Avedon and

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Avedon stops down and has the whole

subject in very tight, sharp, startling focus. He also usually does

whole body pictures. Greenfield-Sanders uses an 11x14 and an

extremely short depth of field, and gets eyes in sharp, breathtaking

focus. He does 3/4 pictures, mostly. I am sure you can see the work

of both on the web.

 

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Large format portraiture is great. Just think of what the camera has

to offer that 35mm can't.

 

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dgh

[john_sarsgard1]

I use 400NC and a 210 for available light portraits with a 4x5, and

like the combination. About the 35mm option...people seem to enjoy

working with a view camera. The experience is different, a little

like having your portrait painted, an experience they can share with

you. You don't have to be behind the camera when you're actually

photographing them. It is really a very different experience than

having yourself snapped with a 35, althought that certainly has its

place. With the large negative, you can easily crop (heresy, I know)

a good headshot out of a larger view and still have a comfortable

working distance and reasonable perspective with the 210. You can

shoot type 52 polaroids (I rate those and the 400NC both at 320) and

collaborate with the people to create a portrait together. I also

like the backlight with fill very much, but find that it's also easy

to do with reflectors. You need either a stand to hold it, or chair

or something, or somebody to help to light 'em up, but no question

about exactly what the light is going to look like, and you can just

meter it with an incident meter. Just a few thoughts...

[david_grandy5]

Using your 210 for a couples portrait would be just fine. I'd use a

400 speed film and NOT shoot wide open. I'd be concerned that the

subjects will move a bit between the focusing and the actual

shooting so I'd want as much depth of field as possible.

 

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I'd also - without doubt! - use fill flash. Outside portraiture

without fill flash or a reflector fill will give your subject's

raccoon eyes and it doesn't matter if you are using 4x5 or 35 mm.

It's very simple to use fill flash with an automatic flash. Just do

an ambient meter reading and let's say it's 1/60 @ f11. Set your

lens to that setting and select f11 on your flash. If your flash

needs to be set at f8 then the lens is now set at 1/125 @ f8.

 

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It occured to me awhile back that I could give my clients a much

better product if I was to shoot their hundred person group shot

with my 4x5, but it turned out that each print would have cost me a

fortune. Prints (at least around here) from 4x5 negs are custom

made - even 8x10's - so I couldn't get them a volume discount like I

could with 35 mm or medium format. Perhaps this isn't true in your

neck of the woods, but you should know this going in. Luckily for

me I found this out BEFORE I shot the assignment.