Vinayak Hegde

I did not have many plans in Tampere and had left it open-ended. When I was choosing hosts on CS I was looking for people who were interested in photography. Marek was a good photographer and offered to host me. I was lucky as Marek has two very talented friends – Alexsi and Tuomo who were good photographers too. In the evening, Marek and I went to TUT (Tampere University of Technology) campus where Alexsi was developing photos of their recent trip to Bulgaria and Slovenia. Alexsi was a film photographer and was manually developing the film himself . The film developing process itself is very laborious as you have to soak the film in water and then developer. Then made wet in fixer to fix the image. Finally the film is left to dry. After drying the developed film can be scanned into the computer. Quite a big difference from the digital photography that I am used to.

While Alexsi was developing the film, Marek called another friend, Tuomo who had just bought a couple of flashes and a reflector/diffuser combo (the round diffuser is seen in one of the images below). We moved to the TUT Campus to take some photos. First we shot some photos near a cliff nearby. As the natural light faded, we moved into the campus nearby which had bare concrete walls. Since I had never worked with external flashes, I was initially volunteered as the model. Some of the photos came out faurly stunning. Then we took turns being the cameraman, model and spotboys .The results were fantastic.

Me	Alexsi

The setup for the photo session is shown below with one flash getting triggered from above and one from the side onto the diffuser to cast soft light on the subject. We kept adjusting the intensity and the distance until we could perfect the light setup. The inspiration for this was the strobist blog. Do read it if you are interested in flash photography.

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