Paul Bohman – Blog – Washington DC Photographer

Normally when I shoot events in dark places (and most corporate event photography tends to be in dark places), I use my Nikon cameras with on-camera flash, which I bounce off of walls and ceilings. I never shoot with direct flash, unless there is literally nothing to bounce the flash off of, such as outdoors in open spaces in the dark of night. The Nikon cameras perform admirably, and I don’t have any complaints about them. But I’m an experimenter, so I wanted to find out what my Contax 645 was capable of.

One complication is that I don’t yet have a flash for my Contax. I knew that the camera was capable of firing my Nikon SB800 flash, even though the TTL (through-the-lens) pre-flash metering won’t work with the Contax, because the TTL feature is a Nikon proprietary technology. I had read that I could use the flash on the "automatic" setting, so I set the mode to "A" and set the focal length selector on the flash to 85mm, since I was using an 80mm lens on the Contax (that’s the closest setting that the SB800 allows), and I set the ISO to 800, because I would be using Kodak Portra 800 film. That sounds like what I’m supposed to do, right? I loaded the film and I was set to go, or so I thought.

Things started badly. I arrived early enough to do a few test shots before the event began. I took out my Contax and tried to take some photos of the decor. I focused and press the shutter button, but nothing happened. The shutter didn’t trip. What’s going on? I tried turning the camera off then back on. I tried switching buttons. After about a minute of fiddling with the camera settings, I had to put the camera back down because people were arriving, and I didn’t have time to continue troubleshooting.

Later in the evening, after I had taken plenty of photos, I went over to my Contax to see if I could figure out what went wrong earlier in the evening. It took me only a second to realize that I still had the dark slide in place, covering the opening to the film. Grrr. That was an easy, if embarrassing, fix. I didn’t spend time wallowing in my embarrassment though. For one thing, I was the only one that knew, and there was no need to tell anyone else. I took out the dark slide and I started to take a few photos of the scene.

One of the great things about the Contax camera is its fast lenses. The 80mm f2.0 lens, in particular, allows for low light photography at a level that no other medium format system can match. The lens still isn’t as fast as a Nikon f1.4 prime, though, and you can see in the imprint on the side of the negatives that I was often shooting at 1/15th of a second in order to get the ambient light to register appropriately. That’s a very slow shutter speed for handheld photography. The photos turned out alright, I think, considering that limitation.

One thing that is definitely NOT fast about the Contax is its focusing system. It performs adequately in good lighting, but it has a really hard time performing in low light. In fact, in many corners of this room, I could not get the camera to focus at all. It just wouldn’t do it. I gave up trying, and focused instead on scenes that had enough ambient light to allow the autofocus system to work. At this point I already had plenty of photos of the event itself, so this was my own time to play around a bit.

When the lens is set to f2.0, it’s about equivalent to a 50mm f1.2 lens on a 35mm camera. It allows the background to fade into really beautiful abstract blurs and blobs of light, as you can see from this set of photos.

One thing that I didn’t discover until getting the negatives back is that the flash seems to have failed to fire on about half of the photos. I’m not sure why. It may be because the Nikon SB800 flash was set to automatically go into sleep mode after a certain amount of time. That’s something I’ll have to investigate. I’m not convinced that’s the problem, because I think it would have affected even more of the photos if that were the case, but I can’t rule it out yet. When the flash did fire, it seemed to produce good, accurate exposures. I was bouncing the flash, and it still seems to have metered adequately.

[EDIT: I did some testing, and yes, the auto standby was the culprit. I'll have to disable that feature in the future when using the flash on non-Nikon cameras.]

Most of the photos that I took in which the flash didn’t fire are too dark to be usable. Film seems to have some rather dramatic and unpleasant color shifts when it is not exposed correctly — particularly when it is underexposed — and it’s really hard to correct those color shifts in post production. Here is the only usable under-exposed photo that I took:

The rest of the underexposed pictures (when the flash didn’t fire) look like mush, both in terms of the color and in terms of the motion blur, because the shutter speed was so low.

So what have I learned?

1. Portra 800 takes excellent low light shots indoors when it is supplemented with on-camera flash. The colors are beautiful and natural, and the grain is not too noticeable.
2. Without a flash, Portra 800 isn’t fast enough, and underexposed Portra doesn’t look very good… or at least I wasn’t able to make it look that good. I scanned the negatives and did the color adjustments myself.
3. The Contax 645 does a horrible job of focusing in low light. Manual focusing is the only option in these circumstances.
4. I probably need to buy a flash that’s made for the Contax camera, or else find out why my Nikon flashes weren’t firing reliably. [EDIT: The reason the flash wasn't firing was because it was set to auto standby. I still think I'm going to get a dedicated Contax flash though.]
5. Shooting film in these situations isn’t as hopeless as I thought it might be, but…
6. … I’m not giving up my Nikons any time soon. They’re faster and easier in low light situations, and they produce beautiful results.

Below are a few of the shots from my Nikon camera (D7000), set to ISO 2500 most of the time. A few of the shots from my Nikon also turned out underexposed, but I was able to make them look decent in all cases. Digital captures don’t suffer from color shifts in quite the same way that film does when underexposed. The underexposed digital captures still end up looking noisy, and the colors have a much narrower gamut, but they don’t start to turn cyan or other weird colors the way that color film does.

And for those of you looking for a corporate event photographer in Washington DC, I would love to do that for you! I do my event photography through my other brand, White Ribbon Studios.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 1:00 am and is filed under Event photography, Film Photography, For Photographers, Photo Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.