This is probably not my first time shooting portraits with my all-time favourite motion picture film stock, the Kodak Vision3 500T. For this indoor portraits session, it was quite a casual shoot I have shot 2 rolls of motion picture film and am actually quite happy with the results.
As usual, I have half exposure left in my Contax G1 film camera after I’ve run out of photography ideas and also working on my travel guide web projects. I remembered the last time used the Kodak ProImage 100 film for streets & travel shooting style, I was also out of ideas and left most of the exposure for the next street photography session.
Back to the main subject, I was quite surprised and really love the results of shooting indoor portraits with Kodak Vision3 500T film stock. It turns out the film results looked so much better than shooting with the Fujifilm X-T4, lol.
Shooting Indoor Portraits with Natural Light
What’s good about the Kodak motion picture film is, it eats whatever light that is around you, which is amazing! As usual, I was quite worried about shooting indoor portraits with natural lighting similar to the Initial D theme photoshoot and the indoor boudoir photoshoot in Malaysia because it requires trial & error, to get the best angle with the best light to create the catchlight so my subject’s eyes to look more attractive.
I was shooting with Angel, who has an innocent, young look and nice facial features. She was quite new to group photoshoots. I really like her facial features and sharp nose which make my photos look different and special. I was also worried about the contact lens that she was wearing because contact lenses are sometimes hard to reflect light but well, it seems there is catchlight on her eyes and I was quite happy with it. It was quite a fast-paced photoshoot shooting with other photographers, so it was quite hard to control the situation.
The photo below is from the first roll and was shot overexposed at 400 ISO, where I have set it to auto DX on my Contax G1. But then for the second film roll, I manually set it to 500 ISO which is the actual film speed. Well, there are slight differences in the highlight.
What I didn’t expect in this shoot was there are a balcony that can be used for the photo shoot and ended up creating my favourite theme based on a music video! I was actually planning to do this theme with one of my muses but it didn’t work out.
Shooting Wide Open Aperture at F2 - F2.8
I was shooting handheld at F2.8 to get both eyes in focus and sometimes wide-open aperture at F2 to get more separation and also let more light in when it little dark. I was actually monitoring my shutter speed so it doesn’t get lower than my focal length which is around 1/45sec.
There is sufficient indoor lighting and well-lit in the Airbnb unit, from natural light to artificial light. I didn’t have a flash for my Contax G1, so I have to shoot the film without flash indoors and it depends on my skill to choose when to shoot and get the best natural light and angle on the subject.
As a result, most of the photos turn out freaking sharp thanks to my Carl Zeiss Planar T* 45mm F2 lens. It’s not a rumour but this lens really produced extremely sharp images. There are a few out of focus photos but it still looks great when it comes to film.
Final Thoughts
Well, here we go, another new project for my film photography for indoor portraits. You can check out more photos from the shoot in the full photo gallery. This shoot is quite casual indoor portraits on film, straightforward and not much of ‘creativity‘ shots like you have seen on Instagram or Lomography. Hope you enjoy reading my post and for new filmmakers or film photographers that would like to explore indoor portrait shoots with a film camera, you can learn more of the basic photography techniques & guides I have on this blog.
Happy shooting film!
