Making Portraits with Vintage Lenses

This article was originally published on Substack.

Alongside my documentary and travel interests on World Stories, Told My Way, I wanted to find a way to talk about the studio and portrait photography work that I do.

Let's start with Jesmond.

As soon as I saw Jesmond's headshots, I knew that she would make a fantastic sitter. She has elegance and poise, and a twinkle in her eye. 

Many studio photographers might turn away from older models. Sadly there's a lot of sexism and ageism that exists even in a broadly left-wing, creative profession. Not only this but models and actors are there to serve a kind of market, and that market is not really there - at least not in Western society - unless you're playing a granny or someone's mum. Alex B, another older model I've photographed, writes about these types of issues also on Substack and the articles are thought-provoking.

I suppose this is where documentary photography experience is really helpful; older faces - and the wisdom that sits behind them - make for wonderful portraits. Each line, each wrinkle, tells a story of life lived, loves lost, of hardship and of happiness. I love to photograph them. 

Planning

Clearly there are some administrative elements to planning a shoot but I'm not going to go into those. Yes you need to book the model and the venue, and do all of those practical tasks. It's outright essential to get it right - but it's not the stuff of written fantasy. 

I nearly always plan my shoots with a specific model in mind, rather than having a creative idea and then casting to get the right candidate. This is probably a function of my limited budget as much as any artistic reason. I like it though. I like the flexibility and the challenge of coming up with an appropriate theme. 

In school Home Economics lessons, we had to devise menus for specific dietary needs. Design, prepare and cook a two-course meal for a guest with Coeliac disease, that sort of thing. This is kind of the same, on a visual basis. While I didn't really know much about Jesmond the person, I knew she was an older female and an actress and model, so I set about some research. 

I started with Pinterest and created a board to collate ideas. For the reasons mentioned above, there wasn't a plethora of inspiration. Often there is, and their algorithm can be quite helpful in suggesting similar types of images to the one you've just pinned. Here though, no dice. Chat GPT it was. I asked AI to recommend to me some photographers who work with older women. I skimmed through a few that didn't seem right. Some ideas I liked but I wasn't sure whether I could suggest them to Jesmond, others were too elaborate, were set outside - this was a studio shoot - or required more resources than I had, such as a make-up artist.

With the help of the chatbot, I came across the work of Joyce Tenneson. Her style immediately stood out as one that would be appropriate as inspiration for this shoot. 

Other than moodboarding - which helps to understand the visual direction of the shoot and also give guidance to the sitter as to what to expect and what to bring with them in terms of clothes and props - I don't usually plan the photos much beyond this. Many photographers will have a set image list, or will storyboard, knowing exactly which poses they want to get in each frame. I would do this for a commercial shoot, or for one that's complex. But for creating images in a studio with me and one other photographer, it feels like just too much process. In the studio itself, a more flexible approach means that I talk to the sitter and we have the freedom to play - usually we both end up enjoying this. 

Planning the Production

Joyce's work is fairly simple in terms of set. While I wasn't aiming to ape her work, there is a simplicity that lets the sitter's beauty do the talking. I started to think about why her images spoke to me, why they were right for this project. This broke down some of the components of the set that I needed to think about.

The light is kind to an older person's face. While part of the point is celebrating seniority, most people want to look their best in a portrait. In terms of studio lighting, for me this meant the use of constant lights and definitely not strobe. Strobe can accentuate wrinkles and shadows and look quite harsh on a face. To establish even light distribution, I planned for a large octobox modifier on one constant light, with a lower wattage fill light coming from one side to eliminate shadow.

There's some texture and movement in Joyce's images that I liked. As well as also softening lines, it nods to the less sharp photos that we saw in the past with less advanced lenses and a dependency on film. Shooting with constant lights helps with this, as your ISO needs to be higher so the images will be less pin-sharp. But I thought that a textured background would add another dimension, and that I'd add intentional camera movement in some images. The pièce de résistance, though, would be using vintage camera lenses acquired from eBay over the years. 

There's something fitting about using old, contemporaneous lenses to photograph an older person. And there's an absolute joy in reviving these lenses anyway. Unlike humans whose weaknesses are strengths overplayed, the strengths of these lenses are their weaknesses underplayed. Distortion, yellowing of glass, scratches, cheap blades - these make for fantastic effects and bokeh straight out of the camera. I had a fun hour the day before the shoot dusting off these beauties and testing them on my camera with an adaptor. Why on earth had I not used these in so long? Their brand names and models were recalled - Meyer Domiplan, Helios 44-4 and -2, and some nameless. 

Joyce's use of draped fabric instead of normal clothes is also very interesting. The drapes kind of blend with the image, and draw focus to the face. There's an implicit lack of judgement here; we cannot as viewers judge the sitter's clothing choices, for they've been effectively neutralised. There are lots of fabrics in the studio, and I trawled eBay and Streatham's many charity shops for curiosities, eventually opting for some brass scales of justice, a large juicy pomegranate and a metallic-flecked burgundy scarf (about £30 in total).

The Shoot

My shooting partner Josh and I set up the dark mottled green fabric backdrop on two C-stands. Using a slightly lighter coloured green backdrop we draped the (pink!) chaise longue with it and then dressed the foot of this with some dreadful fake ivy acquired from the Pound Shop. 

These things often look better in images than they do in real life. They definitely smell less. 

Josh had the idea of setting the main light at a Rembrandt angle which is set, as anyone who's watched a Sean Tucker portrait photography YouTube tutorial knows, at 45 degrees to the subject. The fill light was added with a rectangular softbox. 

I laid out my selection of vaguely suitable props so that they were easily reachable. I like to have them there for comfort, almost. Even the best-planned set-up can sometimes not work on the day. Sometimes it just doesn't look right, sometimes the model is not what you thought they'd be, occasionally there's just not that creative connection. Having the props available can really help to make best use of time and effort, because no amount of reworking a shot can put lipstick on a pig of an idea. Just change it. 

Jesmond, of course, was an enormous part of the success of the shoot. She is genuinely an inspirational person. Warm, funny, empathetic, she is an actress and model now - but has been an air attendant in the past amongst other jobs - and also sells her own paintings. Her activity belies her physical octagenarian age, and she posed effortlessly whilst also chatting to us. It was serendipity to create this painterly look whilst not knowing beforehand that Jesmond is also a painter.

Post-Production

One major advantage of photographing older people is that post-production can be minimal. Skin treatment is largely unnecessary and would be ill-advised! We got the set-up and lighting pretty much what we wanted it to be, so really the only post-prod was the dewrinkling of some areas of the backdrop using Photoshop's patch tool. 

Joyce Tenneson's work employs a kind of dark sepia palette, and I used this on a number of the images created with Jesmond. I didn't like it as much as I thought I would on my own images, and the vintage lenses created this incredible colour that I felt would be wasted on monochrome. For the majority of images I boosted the vibrancy and saturation and, in some, did something that I almost never do. 

Don't tell anyone, but I used a Lightroom preset. Sometimes you have to break your own self-made rules. 

And now you

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on all of this, whether you're a photographer or not. 

I loved this shoot and I love the images created, so I won't be offended if you don't.

Do you like the images? Did I set out to achieve the goal? What might you have done differently? 

Lastly

If you're a photographer, model or indeed someone who would like to have a portrait made, please do get in touch. I run small shooting sessions for photographers and of course am happy to have the privilege of creating portraits for individuals.