Another week with not too much happening. First, I got another few rolls of film sent out for developing on Thursday, which I’m excited for. One of the rolls is Ektachrome that I shot a few weeks ago at the VMFA while we were with some friends. I also did a little bit of testing with some filters on this roll, so I can’t wait to see the results of that too. Another roll is Kentmere 400 that my wife shot on a new Olympus point and shoot camera she got a couple of months ago. Then there is a roll of 120 Ektar 100 that I shot on a friend's 6x6 a couple weekends ago. We did an impromptu photo walk and since I didn’t have a camera with me, he let me use one of his medium format cameras! I am interested in this roll since I was kind of guessing on exposure most of the time. I used a light meter for the first shot or two, but then was making educated guesses from there, so who knows if it will turn out. Then the other rolls are Portra 800 that I shot in NYC last summer, and then Cinestill 800T that was shot last thanksgiving in Chicago.
Saturday was the big, exciting day for me this week. I met up with a friend of mine and we photographed the Monument 10k in Richmond. Since this was going to be my first time at the event, I anticipated lots of traffic so I left my place around 7:15. Then, I figured parking would also be a pain, so I was going to park by the VMFA and walk over. I got to the VMFA so quickly, there was no traffic at all! I parked a little closer, and since I was so early I decided to do a quick photo walk around the fan and slowly make it to where I was meeting my friend.
It was such a great morning, it wasn’t too hot yet and the light was going off! I got a lot of the classic types of shots you get in The Fan, the row houses, some old cars, an alleyway, and light shining on someone's garden. It was a great start to the day!
I then made it over to the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument, and seeing that road completely void of any cars was a little trippy at first. It was nice though, I even got a great shot of someone riding their bike as they were passing by one of the many beautiful homes that line Monument. The lighting is so perfect and it’s a shot that I wouldn’t be able to get any other time.
I didn’t really have a plan going into this, I’ve never shot anything like this before so I decided to just do anything and whatever felt right in the moment. I had with me my wide angle 16-35mm, a 50mm prime, and a 70-300mm. I mostly had the telephoto lens on, I started out getting a lot of shots with slow shutter speeds, stuff under 1/10th of a second. I think I was not aiming to get people running, but the vibe of people running, and the energy. I got a few with some good motion and brought them into photoshop to layer and blend together. I think that it would be better not blended. It became a little too busy and then blending of all the different colors I don’t think really works out too well.
I then put on the wide angle and got big environmental shots. One of which I had the runners in the foreground going to the left, a house in the middle of the frame, in the background is the large radio tower, then to fill it out I had included some trees and leaves to subframe the action and the tower in the background. I like it a lot, but I feel like I need to work on the edit. I was shooting almost directly into the sun, so there is a lot of dynamic range and recovering the shadow detail really flattens out the image which I don’t want. The edit that I quickly did, I kept some contrast in the trees, by darkening the shot globally, then I went and added a linear gradient on the runners to make them more noticeable. Also, since I have a lot of shots with this composition, I might try a blend to really overcrowd the bottom with runners, while keeping the rest one layer and more calm.
I also did shoot some film! I brought my little Minolta Hi-Matic E (I love this thing so much) and loaded it up with some Kodacolor 200 and Ultramax 400. With this I just shot whatever, no goal, just firing off frames. It was fun. That camera makes it so easy, I praise it forever, which I might do sometime later.
Other than that, I didn’t have too much of an exciting weekend. I did go through and organize all the film rolls I have that need to be developed. The count is at 30 rolls, so I feel learning how to home develop and scan is in my future soon. I also need to get better at keeping track of what I shot with a roll because most of them I have no clue, which is part of the fun, but I would like to have at least some idea of where and when I took them. That is all for this week!
Took a quick video to try and capture some of the energy of the day. It was just so fun and everyone was having such a great time!
