Rollie in the Studio

As one of the shoots for my FMP, I decided to use the studio in order to capture some images of the 'alternative style princesses' to mimic those of the Disney princesses as they sit posing for the camera in their oval frames.

For this shoot, I used three types of media: my DSLR, my 35mm Minolta camera and a Rolleicord medium format camera.

To the left is the contact sheet that I printed in the darkroom of my 120, medium format film which unfortunately didn't turn out so well (only two frames were printable). This was due to a few reasons:
Although Rollie was easy to set up and load film etc, for the exposure to be set correctly, you need to use a light meter which just so happened to not be working correctly on the day... However, eventually I got a light reading, set up the shutter speed and aperture and framed and focused the image. The problem then occurred first with the cable release which wasn't firing properly so I scrapped that idea and decided to fire manually. However, as we were in a studio environment, I had set the lights to flash meaning that Rollie needed to be connected by a sync cable which obviously only worked for two shots because the other images on the film were underexposed and hardly visible. I also shot a 35mm film and printed the contact sheet (to the right) which had worked quite well, except for two overexposed images in the centre and a multiple exposure at the end as an accident. Originally I had thought that the film I was using had 36 exposures, however it only had 24 meaning that the film had finished by this point and I was just multiply exposing the last frame.

Despite these technical problems that I experienced, I think that I do have quite a few images that I could use and print, especially on the 35mm film. I really enjoyed using Rollie even if it was a frustrating challenge to get the lights to sync correctly and I am very impressed with the outcome (even if there are only two frames). The medium format style is much more detailed and these images show a lovely contrast which even helps to construct the personality of the character in the image.