STORY BEHIND THE STILL
Olivia Bossert discusses the allure of shooting with film for her fashion images
ABOUT THE SHOT: We may be called Digital Photographer, but that doesn’t mean that every image we’re inspired by comes from a digital camera. “This image, taken on a Nikon F100 film camera, is a part of a large fashion editorial that I called ‘Outlander’,” shares fashion photographer Olivia Bossert. She based this shoot on the TV show of the same name, and it took over a year to plan, from idea to shoot.
“I like to keep my actual shoots quite fluid,” she says. “I’m primarily a natural-light shooter and love to watch how light shifts and changes. Sometimes that means that an image I had planned doesn’t work, and I end up with a shot I’d never envisioned. This image is one of the latter – I hadn’t intended to shoot with a view like this, but the sun was getting lower, and the way the clouds and landscape below were being lit up was incredible.”
After a shoot, Olivia’s editing workflow is fairly simple, but she has to create and back-up her film scans before any real digital processing can begin. “This image had a touch of contrast added in Lightroom, and that was it. I also removed any obvious dust particles or scratches that had found their way onto the negative during the scanning process, using the Spot Healing tool.”
Once a month or so, it’s important for Olivia to colour-calibrate her desktop and laptop screens with a Datacolor SpyderX. “I always want to be sure that the images are going to look as accurate as possible once they eventually get printed,” she explains.
“Shooting on film will probably always be my preferred medium. No matter how much more it costs, or how much longer it might take, nothing can beat the way an image shot on film looks.”