photo shooting is hard work

I have completed my second round of photo assisting for Emily Wilson Photography aka the girlfriend.

My duties included:

• The lugging of heavy crates full of equipment, moving furniture around 
• Folding and unfolding of stands, plugging in lights, etc. Fortunately this shoot didn’t require one of those reflective dishes that fold onto themselves in a way that makes amateur photo assistants look really silly.
• Standing in for the talent to test lighting. I was going to show these to you, but I had old school white tennis shorts on, with my leg up on a chair (I had no guitar!, wtf) and I look ridiculous.

Emily used a medium format film camera for this shoot. I found the process really interesting. The key to making it work is the camera has interchangeable backs, so that you can put a Polaroid back on, then switch back to the 120 film when everything looks right. I always wondered how that worked. Now I know, and now you know.

There were parallel shots taken on a digital Canon 20D, but since the cameras and lenses were different, you couldn’t do apples to apples. Apparently there are digital backs for the ‘big’ cameras, but price is still prohibitive.

The picture here is a scanned Polaroid of the shoot. That is Conor from Bright Eyes.