Photographing Model Elle Baldwinson at The Boardroom Studio

In early May, I had the pleasure of photographing two of the UK's great current female models. The first was Jessica Wilcock as already documented in my previous blog entry. And the second shoot that immediately followed was with Elle Baldwinson who very kindly agreed to travel to Derby and have me photograph her.

I like to use The Boardroom Studio where possible. It's a professional commercial studio in Derby run by the wonderful Phil, who is both very helpful, kind, and supportive as well as super professional and he has a great name and level of integrity in the community.

And Elle has been photographed there many times, so it was a win win.

We spent two hours together, and had a most wonderful time - well I certainly did and I got the impression Elle enjoyed our time working together as well. She was super adaptive at being photographed with a Hasslelblad (the non-digital kind) which does require a slightly different method of working for the model compared to the digital workflow. With digital of course, they move from one position to the next in a fraction of a second because the photographer will often take 3 shots in one second. Whereas when you are shooting 120 film at an average of £3 per frame, one has to pay close attention to what they are doing. Elle understood this perfectly and within about 3 frames, and using the flash strobe beep as an audio queue of sorts, she got the hang of it immediately.

I shot 9 rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 for the shoot, which is rather a lot, but I wanted to make the most of my hiring of Elle and she was kind enough to change into no less 3 outfits, which gave me a good myriad of picture outcomes.

I got developing the rolls as soon as I could afterwards. I developed them all in a way that would create a somewhat dreamy look to the output, as opposed to the more typical high contrast dramatic look we are used to with Tri-X. I achieved this by a combination of slightly cooler liquid, less agitation, and exactly 8 minutes. Whereas I would typically develop for around 9 minutes at about 22 or 23 degrees, with slightly more than average agitation. Overall, I was delighted with the results, and I have used several of them on my homepage. I include, below, a wider selection of my favourites.

I will always be greatful to Elle for giving me her time so kindly, especially at the start of my model portraiture endeavors when not so many people knew me. Thank you Elle for working with me. I hope we meet again.