How To Shoot Film in the Dark Ages
No Swords, Just Cameras. And a Touch of Agoraphobia.
Despite not being a fan, I jumped at the chance to attend the Kansas City Renaissance Festival this year. I feel silly admitting that as being near hordes of folks letting their freak flag fly gives me the creeps. Every previous time I’ve been to the RenFest, my anxiety became so ramped up that to this day, I feel stress creeping it’s hot fingers across my spine and shoulders every time I think of the experience. It doesn’t help that I was a child in an extremely strict household. With guardians that felt very strongly about pointing fingers and staring at people, I was disciplined every time I did either. Decades later and I’m still pointing at folks but I have a hard time with eye contact.
All of that said, if you drop me in the middle of a crowd of colorfully bad acting, sweat and the smell of stale vodka, you will find me silently trying to carry the weight of what I can only describe as guilt. Silly, sure. Especially when you consider that the festival is built around attracting attention and if you’re not staring, you’re not seeing the best parts of the event. But, at 40-years of age, I still feel anxious when I get “caught” staring at folks who prefer to walk around half-naked with Minotaur horns shooting out of their skull. I still feel guilty for looking at pirates with fabrics so luxurious that you can’t possibly help but catch a long glimpse. No one likes to feel guilty or anxious so for years, I avoided RenFest as much as possible.
Regardless, the start of autumn forces me to remember the festival’s existence as cosplaying kings, jesters, bards,(and the like) start showing up at various locales around town. Usually, they’re seen causing a ruckus, singing and shouting in accents that probably piss off true Englishmen. Schadenfreude abound while they shock and awe unsuspecting crowds into learning about their event. Despite the cringiness, I had excuses to tough it out this year: I was in an inspirational rut in need of some creative fill; I had some film I wanted to try out; I hoped that people dressed as wizards and anthropomorphic woodland creatures would make for good pictures. Honestly, any excuse to practice photography is a good one so off to the festival I went, towed by my wife.
After 30-minutes of driving west to Bonner Springs, Kansas, we arrived at the semi-permanent grounds of the festival which, from the parking lot, was secluded behind very tall and ramparted walls,at least one working castle gate, a moat (or was that a sinkhole?) and lots of other accoutrements that come with a medieval fantasy theme park.
And again, the park has some weird! For instance, right after we paid for our tickets and were allowed in by the castle gatekeeper, I immediately spotted a woman in a black bikini top, brown furry pants with large hoof-shaped bottoms to give her the appearance of a faun. To sell the look, she had little brown horns peeking from her pixie haircut, make-up on her lips to give her the appearance of having a short snout and the slowest and most deliberate high-stepping walk I’ve ever seen in real life. Imagine Shaggy and Scooby-Doo tiptoeing around a kitchen in a house full of haunts, and you will have an idea as to what she was doing. Sadly, the faun and I made eye contact and I became too anxious to take the picture; unsure if the looks I was getting in return were as threatening in reality as they were in my mind.
Speaking of pictures, I wasn’t sure which film to shoot so I brought along two different emulsions. The color film stock of choice was Kodak’s Portra 400. In 120 format, it was loaded into the kinda old and kinda heavy Mamiya M645 medium-format camera. Additionally, I also brought an even older (1965?) but much smaller camera, the Kodak Retina IIIc. That old folding-camera was armed with bulk-rolled Ultrafine Xtreme 400 black and white film stock. I hoped having both cameras would work for our planned hour of walking around a potentially very crowded festival. The Mamiya was a bit of a pig to carry, but its 80mm f2.8 Mamiya-Sekor lens had a bright and soft way of recording images and the Portra 400 film was versatile to use as well as subtly warm and rich in its tones. Deciding to use the Mamiya/Portra combo as my “portrait” camera, I needed something to capture moments. The Retina fit the bill as it was super portable and literally folds up to fit into a vest pocket, making it the easier of the two to carry. The UF Xtreme film was extremely cheap to shoot and with 35 exposures per roll, I felt as if I had a bit more breathing room when deciding on what images to capture.
The first stop on the grounds the wife and I made was at a little booth with (what I mistook for) gypsy women working fabric looms and stringing yarn. I had planned to shoot candids but nervously I asked for a portrait of one of the women anyway. I returned the favor by politely listening to the history of the royal seamstress of the medieval era. I’m a selfish asshole and readily admit that I didn’t care to hear the tales but I do recall something about royals and highbloods needing to be sewn into their clothes and the crazy expense of creating purple dye for fabrics… so I can’t be all that bad, right?
Unfortunately, the encounter left me a bit more anxious than I would have liked. To prevent future tales of long length from very eager volunteers, I decided to stick with a more candid style of shooting. The plan was to walk and if I saw a potential shot, stop, compose and fire before repeating (also called taking pictures). But to the surprise of us both, I was stopped and sucked into conversations anyway as we continuously received compliments about the cameras from all sorts of folks. I couldn’t tell if they were volunteers or guests but most of the strangers were definitely photo nerds… Nerds that happened to be dressed as pirates, barbarians, samurai, etc. We even found ourselves having our pictures taken after being spotted at “Thee Royal Photo Booth.” It wasn’t actually called that, but the proprietor convinced the wife that we wanted to trade our street clothes for pirate garb and have a portrait taken. After we spent the entire time, listening to stories of photographic educational excellence, we were accosted by a blacksmith who was a professional photographer “back in the day,” later by an archer who just picked up her first DSLR and finally by a queer unicorn that just liked the look of the Retina camera.
The attention was unnerving but when looking at these cameras, it makes sense that in a festival where everyone is dressed to attract eyes, these vintage tools stand out. The Mamiya is not a small camera, even when compared to the other Mamiya I nearly chose for this adventure: the RB67. The M645 is a big, boxy shape of a professional’s camera with a large hand crank and big lens hood that just screams to be noticed. Most at the festival didn’t seem to recognize the make of the camera but could tell it was old and wanted to engage in talk about film.
And how expensive film is.
And how film development takes forever.
And that film is less sharp when compared to digital. And so on.
One gentleman at a booth of bones and beads knew a medium format camera when he saw one. Unfortunately, he just wanted to join in on the tired banter about how expensive film is and how long development takes, and that digital is just easier, and so on. I wanted to argue with him about the resolution of medium format negatives being better than most digital cameras but I noticed that it was just the old guy and I standing there; my wife was gone. I guess it was fortunate that my partner was went with me to the festival as she doesn’t put up with that shit. Once that familiar smell of boomer reminiscence hit her nostrils, she walked away, leaving me to scramble and use her impatience as an excuse to exit the conversation. Stage left.
My other attention-seeker, The Kodak Retina, is not the tiniest camera I’ve ever used. However, it is the most portable camera I’ve ever had the pleasure of shooting with, it is definitely small for a “professional” system built in Germany. By today’s standards, the camera is little, sliding into a coat or back pocket very easily. The Kodak has three, removable lenses ranging in focal lengths of 35mm; 50mm; 80mm. Being a folding, coupled rangefinder, it is quick to focus, fairly lightweight, has a built-in selenium light meter and hosts a bunch of other slick features for a late 50s-era camera… but the folding nature of the camera chassis was the conversation starter.
After walking the grounds of the festival once, we dove back in for a second lap to take in the sights (and grab some final snaps). There was a group of actors(employees?) engaged in a rousing song at a popular pub; people placing money into the hands of frozen angels that were painted to look like statues; a pair of washing ladies performing salacious dances, eunuchs looking confused and castrated; knights jousting for honor on horses.. I grabbed a lot of shots. Eventually, we ended up closing the place and had to make for the door. Or, in this case.. Make for the castle gates. 30-minutes after we hit the parking lot, we pulled into our driveway, kicked off muddied soles, slipped off our chilled jackets and I got to work on developing the day’s negatives. I multi-tasked the duties and began developing the Portra roll of film first. While developing the color negatives, I had the UF Xtreme stand developing in the kitchen. Overall, I had all the film developed in less than 1.5 hours.
Kodak’s “Professional”-grade film called Portra is supposed to shine when taking portraits. Shine it does, typically embellishing a sort of richness of warmth to both white and black skin tones. The grain pattern of Portra is tight and consistent and is extremely pleasant as long as you don’t underexpose by more than a few stops. The “Gypsy” photo is an example of what can happen by underexposing Portra by 2 stops; there are some inky areas but in the brightest highlights, the grain is barely perceivable. Personally, I prefer Kodak’s less flexible Extar for portraits, but the warmth of Portra makes it one of my guilty pleasures for general shooting on color film emulsions. I was happy with how the Portra shots turned out; not so much with my other film choice.
The festival was only the second experience I had with the less expensive of the two film stocks, Ultrafine’s monochromatic Xtreme 400 speed film. The UF400 is a more limited film emulsion that I find takes some massaging to get pleasant tones out of it. As you can see in the black and white photos, there isn’t a lot of lateral range in the film and if you don’t get your exposure dead-on, you’re screwed. To make matters worse, I chose to stand develop the film which added even more contrast at the expense of sharpness. I gotta be honest in how disappointed I was after developing this film: lots of shots were both over AND underexposed! But, I didn’t choose the film because of its ability to handle light, I chose it because it cost about $30 for 100 feet of it! I should have learned by now: You get what you pay for!
Was RenFest as weird as I predicted it to be? Yes, very much so. I had my reasons for going, but after returning home and developing the negatives, I discovered that the pictures themselves only captured moments. In retrospect, i wish I would have had the eye and presence of mind to work towards forming a story with the photos. Being able to practice the skill of photography in a setting such as the Renaissance Festival was both challenging and rewarding as the static scenery kept changing with the addition of new and extremely varied characters. Man, it ramped up my anxiousness but I’ll happily take the experience if it means learning and improving upon my photography skills.
Until the next adventure.
Cheers.
