Image of the Week: Melissa and Parker, Columbia, South Carolina

You can work really hard engineering lighting setups, backgrounds, props, posing methods, hair, and makeup to get an image like this. Or, you can just always be ready with your camera when all of those variables just happen to converge by chance on the ideal scene.

I prefer the latter.

Our good friend Melissa was sitting in this overstuffed leather chair at my inlaws' house, holding her new son, Parker, when the window light swelled in intensity (the sun must have peaked from behind the clouds). It made Melissa and Parker positively glow. I grabbed my 'blad, metered the light, and snapped off just two frames before the light faded.

To create a print that conveys that glow I saw, I made a digital negative using my Epson 3800 printer and contact printed this image with Palladium, a noble metal similar to Platinum but with a warmer tone. The resulting Palladiotype features an extremely soft, glowing tonality and possesses remarkable archival properties.

Have questions or comments? Send me an email.

Technical Data

I photographed Melissa and Parker, Columbia, South Carolina with a Hasselblad 500CM and an 80mm ƒ/2.8 Zeiss T* lens. The exposure was 1/60 second at ƒ/4 on Kodak Tri-X Pan Professional 320 (EI 200). I developed the film in Kodak HC-110 dilution H (1:63). The film was scanned, adjusted in Photoshop, output as a digital negative onto Pictorico OHP transparency film, and finally contact printed with Palladium onto Arches Platine watercolor paper.

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