Kaori and I went for a relaxing Thanksgiving lunch to a local restaurant. The food was a special prix fixe meal and it was really quite tasty, and so much less work than cooking ourselves. It suited our pace this year.

This isn’t the best photo of Kaori, but I love the quality of the image. I developed it last night, my first time using Ilford FP4 film since I was 17.

This is a fascinating look at how different photographers create different photos based on the story they think they need to portray. Click the image to watch the video.

My niece, Grace, sent me a flattened version of herself to hang out with for a few weeks. Here are some photos that I included in a letter to her school telling about her adventures. Flat Grace will be moving on to someone else soon as she continues on her travels around the world.

I haven’t had any expeditions recently as I’ve been focusing on work, but here are some relatively recent images.

This one was taken a few months ago with my RB67 and Portra 400 film, but I only just got the film developed.

This one is a Leica 35mm photo, again with Portra 400. When you overexpose Portra, it creates pastel tones that can be really lovely. This is something I learned from a delightful blog by Johnny Patience. Film is amazing. With digital, you have to nail the exposure because sensors have a linear response to light and it’s easy to fall off either end. Attempts to recover an underexposed or overexposed shot are invariably unsatisfying — muddy shadows and unrecoverable blown highlights. With film’s sigmoidal response to light, you can underexpose some brands by a couple of stops, or overexpose by six or more stops, and the image will be fine. In fact, you do it deliberately to get different looks. I deliberately overexpose Portra by two stops, and I now scan color negatives myself instead of ordering scans from the developer so I can control the result a little better.

Here’s another example of overexposed Portra. It’s from a roll I took during the San Francisco Pride event earlier this year. Sometime, I’ll add more photos to my earlier post on the event.

And these are digital, from a photoshoot of Eri who wanted some social media headshots.

I need to get better at controlling skin tones when using color. It’s the hardest thing. I think that means I have an Xrite ‘passport’ tool on my Christmas list. The other thing I need to work on is getting the depth of field and focus-point right. That means slowing down, looking up depth-of-field tables, and then where possible measuring distances to the camera.

Fifteen years ago, professional photographers used film Hasselblads. They were very expensive. They are not exactly affordable now, as they’ve been creeping up in price over the last five years, but I’ve been looking for a medium format film solution I can love and haven’t found it yet. So, it was time to try a Hassey. Oh boy. It was love at first sight, and I’m inspired by the possibilities after developing my first roll.

The Hasselblad 503cw, their last film version, uses a 6×6 square format, which not everyone likes, but I think there’s something hip about it. Not great for most landscapes or for portraits with lots of negative space, but it’s very geometrical, mathematical, and gives images a bold, direct feel.

Here are some of the photos from my first roll — a test roll of mostly mundane things to make sure all is working. I used a roll of Ilford HP5 film for the first time as the seller loaded it while he was going over the operation. I like its less contrasty look, but I’ll definitely be trying Tri X too.