Week 36 – Nikki Nuke'm – Kodak Portra 400

December 04, 2015

You know, when I first sat down to scan these images my first thought was "You know, just copy and paste what you wrote from the other photos of Nikki Nuke'm that you shot. Nobody will ever know". Except once I started the retouching process, I knew I just couldn't do that.

If you don't know what I am talking about, please make sure to view the digital photos taken during this series here.

There are few things I can say about this entire series more than "I LOVE THIS". Not every shot was a winner, they never are, but I was able to create a solid series of images and for that I am pretty excited. This is a great example of what a year of constant practice will do for a skill set. I can only hope that I can continue to see things improving, and that my follow up sets with Nikki turn out as great as this one did.

Development Notes:
Standard Development Unicolor C41
Levels adjust and retouching performed in Lightroom

Week 32 – DJ System Fail (ROLL 52!) – Kodak Portra 400

November 06, 2015

**EDIT** I completely forgot to write anything about this series. As you can tell by the title it is the official 52nd roll of the 52 roll project. I'm still going to try and finish the series through the rest of the year. But it may become a bit of a challenge.

This set was part of my testing of my DIY black background. Check out the Extra blog for more info. Cody aka System Fail saw some photos from an earlier test and wanted to be a part of the process. I gladly took a chance and shot some great photos!

Week 18a – Brianna – Kodak Portra 400

July 10, 2015

I met Brianna through Morgan (which you all should remember since she has been featured twice so far in this blog so far).

It took a good while for us to get together but when we did it was totally worth it. We kinda went into this shoot the same way I work with anyone who models for me. Its all about getting to know how someone works. Nothing too exciting or hard, it was more like "come as you are and let's make something happen". The biggest down side was once we finally were able to get together we were working on borrowed time before the sun went down. But that allowed us to work during a very special time.

It's pretty known that magic hour is amazing. Add Portra 400 to that and it's a beautiful thing. I only wish we had more time to prep a tiny bit more, but between this week and next I am pretty happy with what we got.

Development Notes:
Unicolor C41 Kit
Standard Development
Scanned and Color Corrected in Photoshop

Week 6a – All Hail the God-Film, Portra – Kodak Portra 400

February 06, 2015

Just a fair warning this update will be a little longer than my previous blog posts. Mostly because I ended up shooting double what I set out. 2 rolls of Portra 400 ends up to be 72 frames. I will be presenting it in two sections in this blog post. The first will be random shots taken to start roll 1, and the second will be my first attempt at a cohesive photo shoot for this project. Portraits have been my focus, so I hope to master a few things and present more of them soon.

With that many frames, and the fact that I am still learning the quirks of a manual camera, I had a lot more frames that I was not happy with this time around. I will save you all a lot of the hassle and not be including near as many "outtake" photos as I normally do.

Also its worth noting I'm not entirely sure I'm doing what I am supposed to with the developer kit. I seem to have had a lot of very bad water spots on these rolls even after following instructions. Any tips would be appreciated!

Gallery One Below:
Tumblr users will need to visit UNEXPhotography.com/52rolls like always.
Wordpress users...well, I think it just posts everything in a row.

If you have made it this far, now here are the shots from my portrait session with a friend of mine. We have worked together many times, and like always it was more than a pleasure this time as well.

Sadly these photos didn't turn out 100% the way I wanted. I'm still trying to master the camera I am using, and full manual everything is still a bit of a challenge. I found that many of the shots taken were out of focus. I'm still trying to work out what the issue was, but I think its better to move on and learn from my mistakes. Maybe slow down a little (which was one of my goals anyway for this project).

Titan Gallery Below:
Tumblr blah blah blah, Wordpress blah blah.

Developing Notes:
Standard Development using the Unicolor C41 kit.

Post Processing Notes:
I am genuinely surprised at the latitude (I guess you would call it) of this film when it comes to adjusting color levels. It was very easy to create more than a few different "looks" using the scanned negative. I tried my best to color the images as I remember the scene, but I still think it was pretty neat. "God-film" indeed. I think next time however I will try to purposely underexpose by a stop. I ended up doing that digitally and has much better results.

Next week's post will also be technically from this week. I mean, I shot them both at the same time. But it is entirely different, and I think will be a departure from something I would usually do.