A 50´s styled Shoot

Shooting Film in a style out of the 50´s.

(Waring this Page contains partial nudity and is maybe not suitable for younger viewers!)

I asked Julia if she is interested in doing an analog shoot with me, since I am building up my analog portfolio.

Our idea was to shoot something with an erotic touch, but still kind of old styled. Julia came up with the Idea of shooting the Images in a ” sexy 50´s” style.
Since the well-known Pinup style is totally overused I thought the idea was great. Since I never shot in “50´s ” style before, I had to do some research about the Style itself. For this, I searched the Internet for Ideas.

Now we just had to mesh this all up with a touch of erotic.

Some Things that were important.

• The light
• The Makeup
• The used Film
• The Location (in terms of space)
• Finding the right style, with and without the dress.

The Film

I decided to go with Kodak Tri-X 400 Advertising on my medium format camera. Since it is a nice and contrasty film with a pleasing amount of grain.
So it should perfectly support the contrasty style.

I also loaded some Portra 400 Advertising to the Hasselblad. But due to a lack of chemicals, I did not develop it yet. As soon as they are developed, I will load them into the gallery. Well if they are worth it. :-)

For my 35mm camera, i used Rollei RPX 400 (just to try out the film).

The Camera

I decided to use my Hasselblad 500C/M, even that I just own one lens for it, since it is one of my most reliable cameras. My RB67 maybe would have been the better choice in terms of the image format.

My backup camera was a 35mm Nikon, with some Rollei RPX400 Advertising loaded.

The Location

Arriving at the location, i had to find out, that for my particular lens (120mm) the given space was all but not enough.  The room did not really give a lot of space for lots of different angles. But since it was my first try shooting this style i simply decided to go for it and shoot.

The Light

We used available light only, what sometimes tended to be complicated since the light was very changing that day, meaning that starting at an f 5.6 at 1/500s ASA 400 I ended up using the same roll of film with F5.6 at 1/15s at the same location within 10 minutes. That was kind of a pain.
For the images in the kitchen, I had to push the Tri-X 400 Advertising to 1600.

I brought a reflector with me, but it was simply to big to be used in the small space. (you can see in the video).

For measuring the light i used a spot meter as well as a incident light meter.

The Results

For the fact that most things that could go wrong actually went wrong, i am quite happy with the results of our black and white photoshoot.
But see and decide for your self.