Xmas Family Photo Challenge

For the past twelve or thirteen years, it's been a tradition of mine to spend Christmas night with my friend Chris and his family. Early versions of the gathering usually culminated in round after round of Sambuca shots until yours truly was reduced to an incoherent mess, heaving into a mixing bowl, desperately trying to pass out on the couch. Good times.

Chris' family is great: lots of wonderful faces, stories, laughs, love, etc. As far as extended families go, you couldn't ask for more. I live near to Chris and his wife Bozena, so I'm always photographing them but for the past couple years I'd been wanting to find a way to work my camera into one of the gatherings with his whole family. This last Christmas (2008) I got my chance.

Art (Chris' dad) had his circa 1980s Minolta SLR out for the occasion with a flash on the hotshoe. It was a sweet rig for its time: auto everything with a TTL flash so all you have to do is point and shoot. In the couple times I've held the thing, it has mystified me. I can normally pick up a camera and figure out how to turn off the auto features and set the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO manually. But, the design of the camera is very 1980s, with plenty of square silver buttons that did nothing I wanted them to in the few minutes I poked at them. In my defense, Art had the thing set up for his way of shooting and I didn't want to screw up his settings and not be able to put them back, so I left well enough alone and stuck to the camera I brought (a Yashica Electro 35 GT).

At one point, later in the evening after dinner, Art asked me if I'd take a family portrait in the living room and handed me his Minolta. I sorta panicked but figured I'd fight through...I'd just leave it on auto everything mode and blast away with the flash on top...perhaps bounce it off the ceiling. Yeah, that will look sharp. Let the camera do the work! As I familiarized myself with the camera for a minute will everything convened in the living room, joking and working themselves into 'picture mode,' the camera started to malfunction. The flash wouldn't fire. I tried again. Nothing. I gave it to Chris (who was standing nearby). Still nothing. Art was called over and he couldn't get it to fire, either.

This was my moment! I had a small lighting kit in the trunk of my girlfriend's car...not something I carry with me everywhere, but she and I were leaving town to go ride out the last few days of the year in Utah with my mom and step-dad, and I wanted some gear with me for whatever might come up. I'm glad I had it because this was my chance to do a couple things: Get some pictures of this great family, and work quickly in a small strobe scenario to get the results I wanted. First I had to determine what it was I wanted...as I dashed out into the blistering cold high desert night to grab my gear from the car.

I should probably mention that all I had with me was a 35mm film camera: I'd brought with me my trusty Canon AE-1 Program—given to me on my birthday by my late father in 2000—and I had a ZipLock bag full of expired Kodak Gold 100 film. Lighting-wise, I had a bag full of Sunpak 333 and 383 flashes, a flash meter and a set of Pocket Wizards...plus stands and umbrellas.

That's what I had to work with, so I knew I had to keep my lighting pretty general. I wasn't going to be able to chimp the LCD and fine tune a multiple light set up like I can with my digital SLR. I figured I'd stick with one light to keep things moving quickly, plus there were a lot of people in Art's living room, so I wanted to keep the amount of gear to a minimum. I knew the ambient light in the living room was not going to factor into this shot because it was far too dim and I was working at ISO 100. In order to get any ambient light into the shot I would have needed very long shutter speeds, which would not have worked in this situation. Again, trying to work quickly, plus there was a six-year-old in the group and getting her to sit still for a one or two second exposure wasn't going to happen. Because my ambient was going to be so low compared to the strobe, I knew the shadows were going to go black...nice and dramatic but, thanks to the 1/4 CTO gel I put on my Sunpak 333, I was able to achieve a warmth that brought a coziness to the drama of the large lighting ratio. I put the light up high and shot it through a 42 inch shoot through umbrella, which went a long way to mimic the directional, semi-soft light source you might find in a living room. This helped the shots look natural to the setting and everyone was really happy with them. They made a great present to Art on his birthday a couple weeks after Christmas.

I'll gladly call that a successful shoot.

Technical details:

Camera: Canon AE-1 Program
Lens: Vivitar Series 1 28-90mm f/2.8-3.5
Film: Kodak Gold 100 (expired 2003)
Strobe: Sunpak 333 w/ 1/4 CTO gel
Modifier: 42 inch shoot through umbrella
Trigger: Pocket Wizard Plus
Camera settings: 1/60, f/4 and f/5.6, ISO 100
Scanner: Minolta Scan Dual II with VueScan

What would I have done differently?

I was working very quickly, trying to joke with everyone and keep the energy up while I set up. I normally overexpose color neg film by 2/3 of a stop, which I forgot to do here. I should have shot that Kodak 100 at ISO 64. I was able to lighten the skin tones and put them where they need to be with Photoshop, but when you underexpose color neg film the grain gets more pronounced...even at ISO 100.

Canon T90 - Is it OK to love a camera this much?

After trying to convince myself for about a year, I recently found a gentleman in Reno, NV who buys Canon T90s worth saving, rebuilds and sells them with a nice little warranty and everything. Considering how much a full frame Canon digital SLR costs these days (something I have little to no intention of buying any time soon) I think the tiny sum I paid for this new old camera is insanely cheap, especially considering that it's got everything most digital SLRs have in them today (save, perhaps the video camera showing up in newer model dSLRs).



Released in 1986 and manufactured for only about thirteen months, the T90 represents the zenith of Canon's manual focus camera line up. The next SLR they produced was the auto focus EOS 6XX series (650 and 630). Everyone was going auto focus in the mid to late '80s, so Canon changed their lens mount and left thousands of Canon shooters standing with their zoom in their hand; none of their manual focus FD and FL lenses would mount on these new EOS cameras which raised a bit of a stink among Canon loyalists. A lot of people to this day can't believe Canon did and got away with it. I can't even imagine what it must have been like at the time to have thousands of dollars invested in lenses and camera bodies, only to have your camera company of choice turn your world upside down by basically saying, "If you want one of our new cameras, you'll need to drop some coin on new lenses, too. It'll be worth it...they're newer...better...faster...."

What makes the T90 so special? First, you have to consider its features in the proper context: This camera was introduced in 1986 when cameras, by comparison, were square and looked like your dad's SLR. Canon brought in a German industrial designer named Luigi Colani, known for his work designing sports cars for Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini. Gone are the squared off edges and corners, replaced by smooth curves that invite you to pick up the camera and use it. The deep hand grip and LCD display on the camera's right shoulder first appeared on the T90 and became the template for Canon's SLR design from that day forward.

But, looks aside, the T90 made several leaps forward regarding the features Canon packed into their cameras. Up to this point, most SLRs they made had horizontal focal plane shutters that would only sync with a strobe unit at 1/60 of a second (the earlier T70 does sync at 1/90). The T90's precision metal vertical-travel focal plane shutter allows flash sync at 1/250—now the industry standard on just about all pro-level SLRs. If you don't shoot with strobes, this number means nothing to you, so I'll just say it's pretty damn cool.


Additionally Canon packed in several other features like three metering modes: full frame averaging, center-weighted averaging, and a 2.7 degree spot meter. They also loaded it with a built-in motor drive that advances the film at one of two user-selected speeds: Low at 2 frames per second or High at a blistering 4.5 fames per second. Most consumer level digital SLRs on the market today still can't touch the T90's highest frame rate.

In their efforts to appeal to the widest range of shooters possible, Canon also built the T90 with all the requisite Program and Auto shooting modes people had come to expect in their cameras at this point in time, but none of those features interest me much as I tend to shoot almost exclusively in Manual mode (save the few instances when I want to pick up the camera and grab a quick shot with no time to take a meter reading). I bought into the T90 after using my Olympus dSLR showed me how much more control I can have over my creativity with something as simple as a spot meter and a flash sync higher than 1/60. The motor drive is just gravy and not something I tend to use all that often, but it's nice to know it's there for those times when a sequence shot is the only kind of shot that will do.

I'm a couple months into shooting with the T90 and I have to say this camera is a joy to work with. It didn't get its nickname "The Tank" for no reason; it's solidly-built, has plenty of weight and when shooting with it you know you're working with a piece of precision photographic equipment. So far the images it's helped me create have been wonderful. Included here are a few images from the first shoot I did with the camera a couple days after receiving it. My sister and a good friend of ours share back to back birthdays, for which they usually combine their efforts and celebrate together with a low-level gathering of good friends new and old. This year I commandeered a corner of a spare bedroom and set up a couple fluorescent Home Depot shop lights to produce sort of a poor man's bank-o-Kino Flo ala Martin Schoeller. I went through six rolls of film over the next few hours as the set took on a photobooth vibe.....but with me deciding when to go click. I captured very cool shots of a bunch of incredible people...shots I still need to go through and edit down to the absolute best of the best, then figure out what to do from there. 11x14 prints for everyone!!!


The specs for these shots are: Canon T90 with a Canon FDn (New FD) 200mm f/4. I was shooting mostly Fuji Superia X-tra 400 film rated at ISO 250. This was giving me f/4 at 1/125...so I had the camera on a tripod quite low to the ground so I could crouch and shoot everyone seated in a comfy chair. I quickly ran out of the Fuji 400 and had to switch to Fuji HQ 200, which I had to shoot at 200 because I couldn't afford to go any slower with my shutter speed for fear of getting too many blurred shots as people laughed and interacted in front of my lens. Also, f/4 is the max aperture on that 200mm, so I was letting in as much light as I could. Normally I like to shoot color negative film 2/3 of a stop overexposed to open up the shadows a touch, but I couldn't do that with the Fuji 200. Shooting it at ISO 125 was out of the question. As a result, the grain is quite heavy in the three-quarter tones and shadows of the shots taken with the 200 at 200. The 400 at 250 is probably just as grainy, so what can you do? I think the 400 would be even grainier at 400. It is consumer-grade film, after all. Upon seeing these shots, I recently had someone ask me why I bother shooting with consumer-grade film and I didn't really have a good answer other than, 'It's cheap.' I don't like spending more than two dollars for a roll of film at this point in my career. A dollar a roll is even better!