Simple Nudes On Black & White Film
I’ve never been a photographer that feels the need to get overcomplicated with my lighting. Most of the time I feel like natural light is best, especially when photographing a nude. Occasionally one might find me using a reflector to fill in the light around shadows a little bit. Even more occasionally I’ll use a simple static flood light. Maybe five times in my entire multi-decade history as a photographer have I used strobes.
I find figure studies work best when light moves and flows through a frame and across the human figure as it would in typical everyday life.
For this particular series of images it was actually my second time working with Devi. We had a good professional chemistry going in and I knew I didn’t need to bring anything more with me than my Hasselblad, several rolls of Kodak T-Max 400, and my tripod.
Believe it or not, but I never ended up using the tripod.
We got started at an early morning hour and I actually expected the day to be overcast. In true Pacific Northwest fashion though, Mother Nature was doing what she wanted to do, not at all what it was predicted she would do. There was plenty of sunshine streaming through the windows of the old craftsman style home we were making photographs in.
So hey, why fight it? Instead I figured we should embrace it.
For most of these photographs I did something I seldom do with natural light. The model is mostly posing with her back to the dominate light source. Anyone who has ever worked with film knows how difficult this can be to meter and even more difficult to develop. For all of these frames, I metered around the model’s belly button and around the model’s neck to ensure the details of her body didn’t become deep black.
To hedge my bets even further I ended up stand developing every roll from this session. Stand development in Rodinal tends to preserve shadow details really well, which I wanted to ensure was the case here.
I ended up exposing ten rolls of film during this session and got a lot of images I would consider print worthy. The three posted here are some of my favorites and undoubtably I’ll end up posting more one day.
Camera: Hasselblad 500c/m camera with 80mm f/2.8 lens.
Film: Kodak T-Max 400 in medium format.
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