Lucky Soda Photography – Iowa Wedding Photographers

I was thinking of separating some of this content out and placing it in a personal family site but changed my mind. I love simple portraits and enjoy sharing. I hope you do too.

I can’t seem to get away from wanting to push Tri-x. When I load it in my camera I immediately want to shoot this stuff at 800 or 1600. I used to be of the mindset of wanting a flat “neutral” negative so that I can do all the post adjustments as I see fit in Lightroom/Photoshop. That isn’t the case anymore. Now that I’ve experimented with shooting this stuff at 200, 400, 800 and 1600, I can’t get away from the contrast and grain characteristics of this emulsion at higher speeds. It looks so good straight scanned @800 that minimal processing is needed.

Ryan Muirhead said it most clearly, “Everything I love about photography happens behind the camera. Everything I hate about photography happens behind the computer.” It isn’t that I completely abhor post processing, I just love shooting more. Nothing compares to envisioning a specific shot, composing through the viewfinder and then just waiting patiently for that perfect moment to fire the shutter. It’s what seems like a simple gift someone is giving me every time I’m able to photograph.

On to this evenings subject…

Isabella is our oldest daughter. We have been blessed with some very well behaved children. They have their moments, of course, but I am extremely proud of all of them. Bella is so sweet. She’s shy, quiet but still has a very strong way about her. A quick anecdote I sometimes share with people is that when Bella was a couple years younger she would take her older brother and lead him into the dark rooms in the house when he was too afraid to go in by himself. She’s a real sweetheart.

I’m lazy. Especially when it comes to scanning negatives. The Epson V500 has “carriers” (not sure that’s the proper term) that you load your negatives in for scanning. It’s a sort of guide that allows your negatives to lay in the proper area and also gets them to sit a little flatter against the glass. Rather than individually load and scan each image I’ve been enjoying ditching the carriers and scanning strips of negs.

During this set of scans I accidentally had it set to “color” and it made the negs electric brown in color. I thought it looked interesting, but really unusable. So, I desaturated it a bit and decided to post ’em up as is. They’re super muddy and are all post scan. Photoshop was used to crop and somewhat “straighten”.

So in this set of scans I decided to shoot an entire roll of Clare. This is my youngest daughter and she is the fireball of the bunch. She troubles me. She’s only two (three in a few more days) and already talks about boys. She also loves clothes, jewelry and don’t get me started on the nail polish.

Sidenote: Totally getting credit on any band name in the future that calls themselves “Electric Brown”. Could be a wicked awesome ska band.

This is one of the frames that was properly scanned just to show that it is indeed sharp and crisp. Each frame is actually in focus with the exception of only two. I consider this a huge victory coming from fast AF (read: inaccurate) digital systems.