Creating the Photograph is an original series where photographers teach you about how they concepted an image, shot it, and edited it. The series has a heavy emphasis on teaching readers how to light. Want to be featured? Email chrisgampat[at]thephoblographer[dot]com.
Photographer Tomasz Kędzierski has been a pretty fantastic and creative analog film photographer for a while. We’ve featured his work a number of times on this website. Besides the Square Lips project, his homemade pinholes and his solarigraphy, he’s done some higher end work too. Most recently, he was working on a shoot where he was shooting with Provia 100, and to ensure that he got the shot right, he used a Leica Sofort first before switching back to his Hasselblad 501C.
Here’s his story.
The Concept
The Inspiration: Blue – Film by Krzysztof Kieślowski starring Juliette Binoche
My project One Camera, One Lens and One Model with @thesquarelips took an interesting turn: we are preparing an exhibition with our photographs and we wanted to underline it with a good story. We are making a Tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski – a great polish film director who has been a great inspiration for me from the get go. Anyone who is into photography should see his films such as “The double life of Veronique” or his Three Colour Trilogy: Blue, White and Red. I’m serious!
The Gear
- 1x Leica Sofort
- 2 x Profoto B1
- 1 x umbrella deep white M
- 1x OCF grid 30 degrees
- 2 x blue rubbish bag as a colour gel for strobes
- 1 x grey paper background
- Final image with a Hasselblad 501C on Fuji Provia 100F slide film and Profoto Air Remote.
The Shoot
As we were closing our scenes on this project we were short of one final photograph, a paraphrase of Kieślowski’s film Blue, starring Juliette Binoche. I was left with one single frame on my Hasselblad and I wanted to make no mistakes. I needed to figure out somehow the proper exposure for this one. As you know I don’t own a digital camera, so I had to do with and instant option: Leica Sofort! Here is how I did it:
One strobe with a blue rubbish bag placed over it with an umbrella deep white M placed directly above the model; one strobe with a blue bag under the 30 OCF grid for B1 for background.
I have placed a post-it note with aluminium foil over the flash of Leica Sofort, as a flag – I wanted to avoid direct flash hitting the model, and I wanted to trigger the strobes this way. It is very unprofessional to use rubbish bags instead of real colour gels, but I had to improvise.
I know the ISO of Leica Sofort film is 800 and the aperture is 12,7, so I have set the B1 strobes to 6.6 because I felt it would do good. Besides it is a nice number. Fuji Provia 100F is ISO 100 and I set the aperture of F/4.0 on Hasselblad with exposure time of 1/125s. I don’t know the exposure time of Leica – it was just a luck that it worked so well!
I set Profoto B1’s to SLAVE mode just to pick up the flash from a Leica, I did my test shot, waited for four minutes and there it was!
It was supposed to be just a test shot with a Leica, but it turned up so good that I am going to make it the poster of my exhibition – Hommage à Kieślowski, which is going to be shown this autumn at Kieślowski festival in Poland.
And this actually sparks a new idea: why not make more photographs with Leica Sofort! Sometimes limitations are your best friends that push you to create something great and meaningful!
Final Images
