shoot me (one last click)

about a month ago, my good friend loukas mexis asked me to shoot the cover of his new book, shoot me (one last click) - a book about a photographer, his bike, gold, guns, girls. we discussed a bit about possible approaches, and we settled on using the "item focused in the foreground / person out of focus in the background" style. the item on the foreground would be a yashica electro 35 gsn, magnificent little camera, and the one that the main character of the book is using. good light was necessary, so we opted for an early saturday morning shoot by the seaside. loukas couldn't do it, though, 07:30 feeling like the dark ages to him when he tried to wake up, and we had to reschedule for the afternoon - loukas went back to sleep and I stayed awake, feeling stupid, since I don't have the gift of being able to go back to sleep easily.

in the afternoon we set out for mavro lithari, a beach about an hour away from athens. when we arrived, the sun was falling and the light was sweet and warm - the time frame we had was one hour, maybe one hour and a half. I tried some digital shots with a tele lens but they were coming out flat, so I switched to medium format. I loaded up the bronica sq-a with some expired kodak ektachrome 64 tungsten film and went really close with the 80mm/f2.8...

...we tried several different poses for the front cover but in the end the first one was the best, one hand on the camera, a hint of the face in the background. then I had to give some thought on the back cover, so I tried some back shots...

...the first roll was over, and I loaded up a kodak portra 160 - I wanted to use a normal film just to make sure I would get some properly exposed images, knowing that the cross-processed results of the kodak ektachrome would be somewhat unpredictable, so I did some front-cover frames again, which came out with totally normal, boring colours...

...then I tried some photos of the bike, not being sure about the design of the back cover...

...the light was falling fast, I was feeling that the job was over, that I had the images I was after, but I wanted to make the best out of the lighting situation, so I loaded up another roll of expired ektachrome 64t and went for the extra promo material...

...the sun had disappeared behind the nearby hills, I had two frames left and I decided to finish them off with some tight portraits - the first one with an eyes-in-the-camera approach and the other with an eyes-in-the-distant-light-source approach - loukas preferred the first one since he felt that the second one was "like a portrait of a communist leader"...

...during the whole photoshoot we were thinking that the book cover would be a full colour photograph, but it ended up as a collage of different black & white photos taken from various photostories that appear in this blog (heartless, time machine, the last good day of the year, alight)...

...while the back cover featured the bike photograph and the first portrait was used on the sleeve - I very much preferred the "great helmsman" portrait but I understood that it wasn't suitable for this particular purpose.

the book presentation took place on the 20th of june - you can see photos from the presentation on the book's facebook page, you can see the video trailer on the book's web page and you can buy the book online at captainbook.gr and other similar websites.

one hour of sunlight

this entry should have been posted six weeks ago, since most of the films were developed straight after the photoshoot, but I had shot some large format colour frames and I wanted to be able to see the "big picture" before I posted anything. finally, after waiting one month for the colour chemicals to arrive and postponing the development process due to lack of available time, I developed the colour 4x5 frames on the first day of 2012 - best way to start the new year, really. the result was a bit mixed, since these frames were long expired and some of them were slides that I chose to cross-process. moreover, all the frames spent the last months in room temperature, since it did not occur to me to return them to the fridge after loading them in the holders. turns out that some months in room temperature may indeed damage a 10-year-old film that's been kept frozen for most of its life - so, a note to self: always load the film holders on the day before the shoot and always unload them after the shoot.

the b/w frames were fresh fomapan 100 film, no trouble there, and the medium format ektachrome 64t slide film which, although expired, was developed a couple of days after the shoot so it kept its character as much as possible (it went through a cross-process, too). another note to self: stop using cross-processing and stop buying up any weird film that comes along.

so, what about the actual photoshoot? well, let's see... it was a sunny day during november and nicky was into the mood for photos, so we met near panathinaiko stadium and and walked in the woods above it. we only had one hour until sunset so we settled for some simple portraits, using the speed graphic and a leitz diaron 250mm/f4 projection lens. first, a kickstart b/w shot...

...next comes the cross-processed ektachrome 6122, a very old slide film...

...I'm guessing that the oversaturated yellow and red channels are a result of the cross-process, but since this is an 15-year-old film, I can't really be sure...

...back to black & white, and the trusty fomapan 100...

...and seeing that such close-up portraits were a bit "stiff", a change of clothes and style, and a little bit of colour - this time it's kodak ektacolor gold 100, also a 10-year-old negative film, but since it was processed normally, the colours are mostly fine...

...no more colour film in large format, so back to fomapan...

...and then we're totally out of large format film but we still got a bit of sunlight left, so why not try some experimental stuff? load the 6x7 back with some medium format ektachrome 64 tungsten film, bring out the leitz hektor 150mm/f2.5, a change of clothes again (in order to remove the striking red colour from the set) and let's try double exposures...

...and that's it. one hour of sunlight shining through the woods, enough time to shoot 12 frames of large format film plus 10 frames with the 6x7 roll film back and be a bit disappointed with the result - you just can't rush these things.

the new year will see me moving back to medium format for a bit - its portability and speed are quite welcome during the winter - large format works better when your hands and your model are not freezing.