Portraits are more interesting to me when I start a session with a plan. Even if the plan falls apart the minute we start photographing.

 

Lou. Image "camera scanned" from an Agfa XPS Portrait negative which 

originated in a Hasselblad MF film camera. 

It was a cold November day back in the early 1990s and I had just taken delivery of a new lens for my Hasselblad medium format camera. The one that shot square images. The lens was the 180mm f4.0 which promised to be much sharper and contrastier than my older 150mm f4.0 Sonnar lens. The 150s were good lenses but were plagued by flare whenever there was a light anywhere near the front of the lens. Even if it was off to one side. Since both lenses had the same minimum focus distance I could also get a bit more magnification/isolation of my subject with the longer 180. 

My favorite talent at the time was LouAnn. She was gorgeous, patient, smart and cool. And happy to be photographed. I called her up and we arranged a time to go over to Laguna Gloria Art Museum, just there on the lake and surrounded by acres of sculpture gardens and big trees. My goal was to test out the lens by photographing my favorite subject: portraits. 

It was chilly and windy and we didn't stay out long. But we stayed long enough to fill three or four rolls of 120mm black and color film with portraits that ranged from full body to head and shoulders. My favorite frames were the ones done, as an afterthought, on color negative film. Agfa hired me at one point to test and show their new color negative stocks and I found an affinity for their ISO 160 Portrait film. XPS 160. It was a soft emulsion made to handle a skin tones with a very forgiving dynamic range and less saturated colors. My intention had been to do mostly black and white test shots since I had a well equipped black and white darkroom and could rush back to the studio, soup film and start printing later that day. The color film languished. Eventually one of the assistants ran it over to the color lab and asked for development and a contact sheet. 

We were insanely busy back then and so I looked at the contact sheet for thirty seconds and then moved on to something else. When I moved the business from downtown to my own neighborhood everything got packed, labelled and secured. The color negatives sat in one of the filing cabinets for more than 25 years. Untouched. Unused. 

Then, just before Christmas in 2023 I bought some scanning gear and got interested in going back, pre-digital, to all the medium format film I'd shot in the golden age of film. I came across an envelope marked, "Lou, 1994, Agfa XPS, 180mm Sonnar Test," and decided to take a look. 

I inspected each frame with a loupe and found this one. I really liked the serious and calm look on Lou's face. You might have seen the color image a day or two ago but I also wanted to see how well I could do in scanning a color negative and converting it to a black and white image, but without having to buy everyone's favorite scanning conversion software, "Negative Lab Pro."

Since I'd already made the color file and had gotten the color close to my original vision I worked on from there. I did a few tweaks to the color channels but most of my work was just to get the contrast and the zones of tone right on Lou's face. The skin. 

One thing struck me immediately when I made the very first scan of this negative. The Hasselblad 180mm f4.0 had the absolute worst bokeh of any lens I have ever shot. I think it's because the leaf shutter has only five blades. The simpler design is more rugged but it seems to over ride the aperture's appearance in out of focus highlight and create hard, five edged patterns all over the background of a frame. It's awful. So bad that I spent time blurring and darkening the background in these samples to hide the awful performance of the lens. Amazingly, since studio work was never done with highlight and lights sources in the background I never noticed that fault of the lens before taking it outside. It never showed up. But wow, there are no bokeh balls back there. Just hard edged polygons. 

So, my plan for the session was to get some good black and white images with the new lens and to show off how well the Hasselblad 180mm works at throwing the backgrounds out of focus. I came back home chastened by the industrial chaos of the lens and, at the time, (pre- modern PhotoShop) no way to correct the background. But with current tech and current software we can fix so much and now I can enjoy the look of the portrait here and not be put off by things that are now fixable. I still wouldn't want to shoot outside the studio with that lens again. Give me a little flare but leave my backgrounds elegant and soft.

check out the bokeh in this partial shot....

It's just terrible. 

So, my plan of becoming famous by using this particular lens totally feel apart. Nice to know it from a test. Once you identify a fault you can generally avoid it. but ..... yikes. And that lens was $2500 back in 1994. What the f*$k was I thinking?

I used the lens a lot in the studio and it was generally well behaved. But the minute we needed to have speckles of highlights in the background the lens went back into the equipment cabinet and out came something "better." I was actually happy to eventually see that lens leave the studio. I hope the next owner had better luck. But that was a long time ago...