La Penza

How do you create an image of someone who creates images? Lisa Penz is an artist who creates beautiful paintings of female faces with large luminous eyes, merging traditional and pop art styles with a very cool result. We set up a session to shoot Lisa with the large format camera, and Fred came up with a fun concept to hint at Lisa's trademark big-eyes look, while also creating an intriguing portrait of an artist. When the images are processed and scanned I'll post the results (or a link to Fred's blog), but for now you can have a peek at the behind-the-scenes of the second part of her session (where we shot some simpler PR portraits of Lisa).

The full scene, and Fred discussing poses with Lisa.

Fred adjusting bellows of the camera to focus. He focuses by viewing the projected image of Lisa on the ground glass back.

Having the image view upside down and backwards (camera optics) makes for an interesting challenge to compose and focus, but Fred's been shooting on this type of camera since well before he was shooting digital, so it's become second nature.

What I see when I look at the ground glass before he replaces the view back with the film back. The film back is opaque and must be removed to re-focus, so from this point until the picture is taken the model must not move!.

Fred taking a light meter reading while I snap this shot of the ground glass on the camera. I've helpfully turned it around so you can see it better. :)