Meetup #8 – Film Noir

Two weeks ago, the usual suspects, a handful of new faces and myself got together for our monthly Sydney photographer’s meetup.
This time, we were shooting in the style of ‘film noir’ (think those gritty 40′s and 50′s crime novels, black and white, lots of grain, high contrast).
Having had a model lined up for 3 weeks, you can imagine my distress upon contacting her the day before to be told “Oh, I hadn’t heard from you so I assumed it was off. I’ve taken another assignment.”
Oh great.
So, I put out a distress call to all the models I’d turned down for the shoot.
Are any of you still interested, and are you available TONIGHT?
Luckily, one of them came back to me within the hour and said yes, she could and would be willing to model for us.
Phew!
Until a couple of hours later when she sms’d me to say that no, she had a doctor’s appointment she couldn’t get out of.
I’ll forgive that one. You health is the most important asset you have, so I’m ok with a model cancelling for that reason.
But now I’m looking for ANOTHER model!
Thankfully, Rakesh was able to talk one of his co-workers, Samara, into modelling for us, even though she had never modelled in her life!
She was really bubbly, and ended up being totally awesome value to shoot with! Good on ya, Samara! And thanks for bailing us out!
So, with Samara and Kade (who was also fantastic in getting into the role of… whatever that role was!), we headed off to Aspinall House at the Scot’s College to do our shoot.
And wouldn’t ya know it?
For the 6th time in 8 of our monthly shoots…. yep, it was raining AGAIN!
Still, that kind of added to the nature of the shoot, so it wasn’t too bad!
For those interested in the technical side of shooting in this style, allow me to elaborate (and many thanks to Shelton Muller and Glynn Lavender for their input on this).
The goal here was to get the shot right IN THE CAMERA.
Now, those who know me, would also know that I shot exclusively in RAW.
But not for this shoot.
Nope, I broke with tradition and shot JPEG.
I set my camera to black and white, jpeg fine, and I cranked the contrast setting to the maximum value.
Some might say I went too far with the contrast and that I’ve lost shadow detail… I would say it’s a subjective thing and I got the look I wanted.
And with this style of photography, you want to metre for the HIGHLIGHTS.
This means that you can actually shoot all this stuff hand held, because you’re camera WILL give you decent shutter speeds once you tell it that you’re interested in retaining highlights at the expense of losing shadow detail.
I highly recommend that if you’re interested in pushing yourself photographically that you get together with a couple of friends and give this style a go.
It is certainly a lot of fun.
The props?
I went to a costume hire shop for the trenchcoats and the hats.
Samara’s dress was picked up from an op-shop (second hand clothing store) for $8!
And the pistol’s were toys out of my son, Max’s, toy box.
Sure, they were plastic, but would you have known that if I hadn’t told ya?