October, 2024
Vivien on Instagram: @vivienjasmin
A very good friend recommended to reach out to Vivien to ask her for a portrait session. So I did - and Vivien and I met at my home studio on a Friday this fall. The weather wasn’t the best so it became obvious, natural light portraits may become a challenge today. Hence, i also prepared my studio strobes - and it turns out we had to use them most of the time.
In this session, i wanted to approach the portrait shooting slightly different to push myself a little bit. As always i prepared a moodboard, that i share with the muse a couple of days before the session. This is an effective way to get a shared understanding about the kind of portraits we want to create. However, i asked Vivien not to bring more than two outfits and to ignore the outfits on the board. The idea was to focus on expression and emotions and less the outfits and poses. During the shooting i gave a lot of time to her, allowing her to get into different moods and only occasionally hit the shutter to capture the situation.
I must say - this was an incredible experience and demonstrated to me what’s the essence of portrait photography. The results are amazing - i am in love with them - and you can call they are genuine, authentic and timeless.
In some of the portraits, you can sense that Vivien is quite a funny an very happy person. So I think it was also a challenge for her to allow her getting in some moods. She tried hard to get into the moods - but once the photographer (aka me :) ) was talking to her - she often let go and just laughed out as she couldn’t hold the mood anymore. So you can tell we had a lot of fun, too.
Thank you Vivien for experience this challenge with me together.
There will be soon some results from a roll of Portra 400 with my Hasseslblad - but oh gosh - mid roll i found out i measured the light for ISO 100 and not ISO 400. So i am curious what will come back from the lab.
Update
The film arrived from OnFilmLab - and despite my wrong exposure settings, the results are amazing ! It is incredible how flexible film is.