Tonight at work I have been
thinking of the monk photos, what they should look like. I quite often shoot
tighter head and upper body portraits but what I want to start to do more full
body verticals that include the feet. For years my 8x10 white background shots
and my 4x5 portraiture work have been 3/4, 1/2 body and various versions of
head shots, now I need to go wider.
This coming week off I will try to
make some shots with the Deardorff and the 250mm Fujinon. I will make verticals
with very limited depth of focus, maybe shooting at F6.7 or F5.6. I need to
keep the shutter speeds up around 1/8-1/15 or higher. Like Sturges says
the thing that destroys a large format portrait most often is the background, I
need to concentrate on finding the right backs for the pics. Even if I have a
very shallow depth of field of 6 inches or so I need to find at worst a neutral
background or at best a background that helps the picture tell its story
better. I will also try using my largest reflector to bounce some light on my
subject.
Anyway it should be fun to do these
portraits up, I will shoot the Ilford HP5 film (got it with my blog
advertising money) for now but later if everything goes to plan I can do
portraits in thai of Monks/Police/Soldiers/Ladyboys/Construction
Workers/Fisherman/Students/Office Workers etc with the same set up using my
more expensive Tri-x.
In my mind I can see the photos now in a nice gallery, large prints, dozens of them, maybe larger than 20x24, heck maybe life size. The prints are vertical portraits of people across the country of Thailand, my "Khon Thai" series brought to life. The portraits would tell stories of the humanity of the Thai people, the variety of who and what they are. It would be f-cking beautiful, and an important way to use this film. Gosh I got to try hard to get this done.
