Portraits with Samuel Richards

A few weeks ago I did a shoot with my friend Sam in Capitol Hill. We'd followed each other on Instagram for a few years and he'd recently moved to Seattle. Sam's done some modeling work in Spokane and Seattle with a few different photographers, and I've been wanting to try my hand at portrait photography.

These shots are from my Mamiya 645 shot on Lucky 200 at box speed, developed by Panda Labs in Seattle.

Before this, I'd only put two rolls of film through my Mamiya 645 so I'm still pretty new to medium format photography. The biggest challenge for me with the top-down viewfinder is the fact that the viewfinder is mirrored. Left goes right, right goes left and then tilting just makes me dizzy. I've slowly gotten more comfortable with it.

The scans that I got back were pretty good but I did spend a little bit of time with the color grading and bringing down some of the highlights. I used my incident light meter to help me measure for the scenes but in some of the shots the sun reflecting off of his skin was over exposed.

I've noticed with Lucky 200 sometimes the highlights get a little bit of red halation and counteracting that was a bit of a challenge.

These shots really worked for me because they combined my love of PNW architecture with portraiture. Seattle has so many unique architectural styles from the decades leading up to the tech boom. Unfortunately, everything after that feels dead and soulless but there are still a lot of great builds spread throughout the city.

These were the first shots off the roll and I remember having to take the photo twice because I knew I metered wrong for the first shot. The left was overexposed by just a bit, but I still don't hate it. It's rare for me to actually like every frame on a roll of film.

This is one of my favorite shots mostly because I got exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted to pose him in front of this corner where you get the wall of graffiti, some depth with the ground behind him and then the additional depth/surface from the ramp behind. Even with how noisy the background is, he remains primarily in focus and overall makes for a compelling shot.

Here's the rest from the roll! Unfortunately, that last shot of Sam down below was over exposed. I really liked the "Throw that bitch away" on the trash but it really didn't come through in the image.

Next time I'd like to:

• Try shooting at golden hour
• Experiment with more sitting/standing poses
• Incorporate more strangers into the mix