This is one of my photographer friends, Yve Fontilea. She’s an easy bay based professional photographer. She and I agreed to do a mutual portrait session. We met last weekend at the Alameda Naval Base, which has an endless supply of interesting backdrops for pictures. A cute downtown area, barren huge parking lots, abandoned and active warehouses, Navy ships, subsidized housing.
These were taken with my Burke & James 8×10 camera, with the Gundlach triple-convertible lens. The film was Kodak TXP 320 pulled to ISO 80, developed in stock Xtol for 5 minutes. Printed on Ilford MGD.1M glossy RC paper.
You can see one of the pictures of me Yve took, here.
I’m finding this combination – lens, film, developer – works really well for these portraits. The lens itself has so much character, it really makes these images work. I feel sometimes that I’m just enabling it, I’m not really doing much at all myself. I just set it up, point, and shoot.