Tag: illuminati ball

Illuminati Ball on black and white film

I spend so much time in a digital world, particularly in my job at Swift Communications managing technology, that sometimes it feels good to step into another world. For the first Reno Illuminati Ball, I brought my Minolta X-570 film camera to Reno Provisions to shoot the event, for myself, on black and white film.

I wanted to capture the candid, up-close shots of people’s faces or in this case, their masked faces. I particularly love the shots of people breaking out of character to check their smartphones. It kind of proves the point I was trying to make by bringing an analog camera. The best irony is that I attended an event hosted by Reno Instagrammies and used the slowest form of photography possible. It took three weeks to receive the developed prints.

The event environment and camera presented some interesting challenges. I knew the event would be incredibly dark and the costumes colorful. Nonetheless, I chose the black and white film for two reasons, both practical and accidental. Practically, I wanted to eliminate the distraction of color and focus on faces. Accidentally, Gordon’s Photo Store only had 3200 ISO film in black and white and not color.

Another challenge came from the camera and flash combo. The camera has an internal light meter, just like modern DSLRs, and allows you to set the film up to 3200 ISO. However, the flash meter only meters up to 1000 ISO. This meant the two devices wouldn’t communicate with each other very well. Nonetheless, I shot wide open on a 50mm f/1.7 lens, set the flash to auto distance, pointed it at the ceiling and hoped for the best.

I really enjoyed what I got. The scans, unfortunately, are pretty low res and add a lot more grain to the digital images than what appears on the nice, creamy prints.