Hayley Tavonatti // Eugene, OR
“I know we’ve never met, but would you be willing to meet me at 6am in the middle of the forest two hours away from civilization, on a hiking trail that doesn’t have any inkling of cell phone service?” Though a bit hyperbolic, because I had photographed a few mutual friends, I am constantly grateful for the trust ballerinas give to me.
The morning of this shoot, I left my friend’s house at 4am to make the two hour drive to our meetup spot, a hiking trailhead called Hobbit Trail. In the dark, it can be quite easy to miss the trailhead, and even easier to miss without cell service and working GPS. Upon arrival to what I thought was the trailhead, I realized that I no longer had any GPS access, and suddenly became incredibly nervous at the idea of Haley zooming past me, and us never connecting. I decided to pull out of the parking lot, and head back to the main road in the hopes that Haley might see me, dressed all in black. Like any responsible ballerina, a few minutes later she arrived with a friend in tow, and we were able to laugh at our luck. Verizon happens to have better cell service than T-Mobile, and that was our saving grace.
Technical mumbo jumbo: I never really understood what was meant by the saying that black and white film has much more exposure latitude than digital until this shoot with Haley. I typically tend to overexpose Ilford HP5 by about one stop (whilst developing as normal), but don’t make it a point to regularly push it more than that. Film latitude usually refers to how many stops under and over the correct exposure you can go and still get reasonable prints.
On this particular shoot, I had been using a 3-stop ND filter (essentially a pair of sunglasses for the camera, to keep light from hitting the film). The Hasselblad 500CM camera derives part of it’s name from having a maximum shutter speed of 1/500th of a second. Combined with HP5’s speed of 400 ISO, you’re looking at f/16 on a sunny day. On an overcast day like this, you can open your aperture to f/11, or even f/8. After exposing for f/4 and 1/250th (3 stops equivalent difference of f/8 at 1/500th), we moved on. Upon moving back towards where we had began, I realized in horror that on the ground in front of me lay the ND filter: I had just overexposed this image by +4 stops on accident. Little did I know, that HP5 would handle it like a champ, and I could pull all this information out of the shadows and still retain perfect highlights.
Fun fact: when I was 12, I put mustard on my feet because I had heard that that will make your hair grow. I thought having hairy feet like a Hobbit would be so cool…
October 18, 2020
