Flats

Once upon a time, I was a wedding photographer.  I only did it for a while, about a decade, and mostly I did it for friends.  The last time I did it was for my little brother, and that was a few years back, and that was a whole, other, different story.

In those days, my children, cameras used something called film.  Cameras did not come free with every cell phone.  You had to buy the film, and you had to load it into the cameras, and when the film ran out, you had to stop taking pictures.  Film came in different formats, or sizes.  You had to buy the right film for the right camera.  I used to use two, or sometimes three, cameras in those days when I was doing a wedding.  (As well as the number of different lenses, but that's another story too and we won't go into that right now.)  One of the cameras that I used was called a large format camera, because it used a large frame of film.  This gave it an advantage in that the pictures were higher resolution and higher quality.  Unfortunately it came at the cost of 1) a higher price for the film, and 2) fewer pictures that could be taken on a roll of film.

The camera that this film went into was called Mamiya.  It was a twin lens reflex camera, with an iris diaphragm shutter. This technical detail, of the iris diaphragm shutter, is important to this story.  I used this camera for more formal, rather than informal (casual, candid), shots.  For this particular couple, we were shooting late in the day, towards sunset.  The sunset was rather beautiful, and so I set the camera to the highest shutter speed that it would do, and set it up with a flash.  This is where the iris diaphragm comes in.  On ordinary, or rather the more common 35 mm cameras of the day, when you use flash you had to use a rather slow shutter speed because focal plane shutters couldn't move across the entire picture frame in a faster time frame.  But the iris diaphragm shutter could take flash pictures at very high speeds.  This meant that I was able to shoot directly into the sun, and use the flash to fill (as we called it) the faces with light, to account for the fact that the camera was shooting directly into a very bright light source (that is, the sun).

The pictures turned out very well.  Particularly that one, with the couple facing the camera with the sun between them.  It was an impressive, and very beautiful shot.  When I took the pictures to be processed, at a professional lab, the clerk was very impressed with the final results.  She called one of the owners, all of whom were professional photographers.  He was also very impressed with the pictures, and asked me where do you get your flats done?  He didn't believe that I was able to take this picture in a natural setting and thought that I had posed a couple against some kind of painted or photographed backdrop. 

I was reminded of this story last night on the ferry.  As we were getting off, Number One Granddaughter noticed the sunset, which was, indeed, gorgeous.  It was a gorgeous mix of oranges and pinks, and her grandmother would have loved it.  So, Number Two daughter took a picture of the twins and myself against the sunset, with the flash, from her cell phone, filling in our faces.  It too is a gorgeous shot.  And a lot easier to take.