Self-Portraiture (Part 5)

After deciding I didn't want to use digital images for my work, I had to set up my lighting setups again in the studio and reshoot on film. I used my aunt's Zenit-E 35mm camera, as it was given to me in response to her hearing about this project, and I expect it has been used to take many family photos. I used Ilford 400 ISO film. Unfortunately the flash remote wouldn't connect to the camera because it's so old and analogue, so Kat had to count down to when she was taking the photo of me and I had to press the "test" button at the same time that she pressed the shutter. We also only had the studio for a short time because someone was filming in there all day, so we did the whole thing in around 40 minutes. I hadn't prepared for this shoot at all because I hadn't planned to reshoot, so I had to borrow a shirt and jacket from the fashion department and I had to go to Primark to buy a white t-shirt and a tie. I'm glad I did this because it means that the portrait will look even more similar to the original, and I won't have to edit out any text from my t-shirt.

Here's how my images turned out:

As you can see, the flash didn't fire right at the same time as the shutter for a lot of the shots. We also couldn't see if the lighting was quite correct because the Profoto lights only shine when they're triggered by the flash. I'm definitely happier with the second half than the first, but overall I think we definitely could have done a better job. Considering this, I decided to try again, but my roll of film came out blank. I think they would have come out perfect, so I'm really disappointed that none of the photos developed. I'm not going to shoot again though, because I've already done this shoot 3 times and I'm running out of time to get my overall project done. However, I did make a darkroom print with one of these images:

I'm pretty happy with this as a print, but I'm just not happy with the photo itself. I think the posing is off, as well as the lighting, and the bottom of the frame is blurry. I'm not quite sure how that happened, because it's on the negative so I know it's not an error made while exposing the paper. Although I'm disappointed with how my film shoots came out, I'm grateful to have my digital shoot to fall back on.