Stepping back in time

Many years ago, I assisted a photographer (who shall remain nameless) on some shots for the cover of FACE Magazine.

Given a free reign, the idea was that we would photograph these up-coming entrepreneurs (to quote George W, the French don't have a word for that! lol) in black and white, making a lifesize earthy print (actually done at Joe's Basement in Wardour Street) which we then had spray-mounted to foam board and placed on an easel.

Then, having simultaneously already taken colour film as well, which was then processed E6 through C41 to get vibrant colours, we projected the colour shot onto the black and white, trying carefully (actually, sometimes for hours!) to match up the eyes so they were completely in focus, colour on top of black and white....the rest didn't matter, whatever distortions from one shot to the next provided a vibrant ghostly shadow effect across the shot.

As you can imagine, there were times we looked through 50 or 60 shots just to get one where the eyes would actually synchronise colour on top of the B/W. Not even the best of models can re-create exactly the same shot/look/position time after time.

We moved the projector sometimes fractions of a millimeter on it's axis to get this to work...and no-one was allowed to breathe! Once done....we then shoot the result....all large format of course. Some of the shots were amazing!

I thought I would try to re-create that here....to see how digital would stand up to the task. First I would say that it's near impossible to create the amazing results we used to get E6-C41 from large format film in the 80's and secondly, you don't seem to get anywhere near the same 'double image effect' gained by projecting one image onto another.

Technology is amazing and I'm a fan. But sometimes, just sometimes, the traditional way is best!