Tag Archives: Risque

Kat MF A0118 “Full Service”

by Boris Starosta

Kat’s Full Service was shot at a perfectly chaotic and disheveled, local “hole in the wall” tire/repair garage in an older part of town.  I’d been looking for a place like this for years, to re-interpret a famous picture by Herb Ritts, Fred (google “Fred with tires” there are actually several variants).  After finding this shop in 2013 or so, I shot my first “Fred” session with my beloved partner M, and though this produced some wonderful MF3d images, I feel somewhat restrained in publishing them.  To have greater freedom in publishing the image, I decided this past year to reshoot it with a “professional” model, and this slide is one of the images that came out of that session.  (By the way, Kat really was a professional, and of the nicest sort.  She was super helpful and accommodating in the challenging location, totally un-self-conscious and focussed on the modeling tasks at hand, and spontaneously creative in her posing, even after we had attracted a small audience of passers by.  And she was fairly easy on the eyes, too;-)

Now, this particular image does not follow on the Herb Ritts image.  (I did get one good facsimile of Ritts’s “Fred” with Kat on film, but I am holding onto it, read on).  But at least this image is in focus!  While this session with Kat produced many fine images on my digital rig, my efforts with film were unfortunately plagued by bad luck and, frankly, operator error due to my long absence from shooting.  (The last time I’d shot a model with film was about one year prior, in the summer of 2017 – Selene at a river, an example included in this round of the folio).  I shot three rolls of 120 with a “new” Sputnik, yielding 36 stereo pairs, and a pair of 220 rolls with my twin Mamiya 6 rig, yielding 24 stereo pairs.  This particular shot came from the Mamiyas.

All of the Sputnik shots were essentially out of focus…  either I made a mistake, or the lens markings were off.  The garage in the background was in perfect focus, but the model herself was a bit soft on all of the Sputnik shots – a very great disappointment!   This was only the second time I had used that Spud, which I had acquired in 2018, after the first couple of test rolls seemed to come out fine.  But the session with Kat was more demanding: it was more close up, and due to the light in the shade, I had to open the apertures a little bit, shooting at f16 I think.  The imagery, though “out of focus” for MF3d slide viewing, is however good enough for scanning and stereoview printing… but you know that is of little consolation.

All the Mamiya shots were in excellent focus, but a different type of operator error caused more than half the shots to be badly out of alignment – and in such an odd manner that there is no fixing it.  I might include a copy of one of those in future, as an exercise or challenge for everyone to figure out what I did wrong.  This view of Kat – “Full Service” – however does not suffer from the alignment problem.  It is one of less than ten stereo pairs that ended up looking pretty good.

The upshot is that I’ll probably want to return to this garage a third time with a model – beating this creative idea to death as it were.   I haven’t decided yet, but I imagine the guys at the shop won’t mind.  They’ve been quite amused to have me there with a model.

 

PS: prior to the session with Kat, I tried to get two warm up filters for the Mamiyas at least, but couldn’t get them in time.  Next time around the color will be much better.

 

Bazaans MF C0109

by Boris Starosta

 

Alright.. this one is a little bit nutty.  I hesitated putting this in the folio, but I thought: it’s okay if people see where and how I make mistakes…. and yet it might still be entertaining!

The film had gone bad, probably just from old age.  Both L and R show poor contrast, weak blacks.  The film looks underexposed, though that seems unlikely to happen to me in studio.  And the L and R film shows a slightly different color, both tending too much towards magenta.  So: let that be a lesson to me: stop using twenty year old film!

But worse than these defects is that I shot too close… way, way too close up, given I was shooting with the twin Mamiya 6 rig, which has a stereobase of over 3 inches.  What was I thinking!?  I wanted to have an image that did not include the waist, I just wanted head and shoulders and chest.  I’ve shot that way before doing cha-cha with a motor-drive Hasselblad (baseline of maybe an inch), but here for some reason I thought it would work out with the twin rig.  Silly.  Shooting from farther away might have worked better – if I’d had some longer lenses (e.g. 150 mm).

But still I think the the image is interesting.  Note that even with the far points set at infinity separation – i.e. the edge of her elbow, not four feet away from me, set to infinity separation – the near points could not be brought to be “behind the stereo window.”  So the actual space of her body, which spans a depth of just a foot or 18 inches, in the MF3d view geometry effectively spans five feet to infinity.  There’s a lot of stretch!

This is the way I shot for many years in 35 mm film, using a twin rig of film SLRs.  All those early images of mine look too stretched to me now – but I guess old habits, or old errors die hard.

I hope you can enjoy it anyway.