The day I was channeling German photographer, August Sander.
When I say, "We" I mean I was working with my assistant, an art director, a make-up artist and several people from the client side. The client was Schlotzsky's Sandwich Shops. Our brief for that day's shoot prioritized getting great studio portraits of the CEO but a secondary goal was getting some interesting product shots of their fresh baked breads.
We had a young, fresh model there for the actual baked good shots and we worked with a 4x5 inch view camera and color transparency film to make images for posters and placed advertising. It all worked out just fine. The art director had a nice, workable shot list and our casting was good.
Near the end though I noticed the CFO --- who was also attending the shoot. I mentioned that I liked his look and that with a chef's jacket and some simple lighting we might have fun doing something a bit different from our usual well lit, every shadow filled, deep depth of field ad shots.
The CFO was initially resistant but the CEO cajoled him into playing along and I set up a simple, big soft-box to one side and no fill to the other (although there is always some residual fill in the studio from the white walls on the opposite side of the main light --- unless you block them with a black flag of sorts).
I pulled out an old Rolleiflex 2.8 ( a twin lens camera of some note! ), loaded a roll of 120 Tri-X film and took twelve frames on the roll of film. I cropped the resulting frame into an 8x10 format because it seemed just right and helped me get rid of a pesky propping artifact that intruded on one side of the frame.
I printed the image on Kodak's Ektalure paper (G surface) and gently toned it with a bit of selenium toner.
We didn't use the resulting image for anything in the advertising campaign but I always like the image and many years later a friend, who is a curator for a large, photo-oriented museum, saw the print and instantly exclaimed, "Ah....August Sander." I was flattered. The print sits in a stack in the studio and when I think we've gone too far with something in Photoshop I look back over at it and realize that all we ever needed was the right subjects, some film and some time in the darkroom.
