Cool use of old-school photography
24.05.11
By John Lok, The Seattle Times
I have always wanted to use a panoramic film camera in my portraiture work, so when I was asked to take on this next round of Star Times all-area high school athletes, it was the perfect opportunity to finally try it out.
The biggest challenge for me with this recurring assignment has been how to show the large groups of athletes in an interesting way, without cramming them all into a traditionally-sized camera frame.
I chose to rent the Hasselblad XPan II film camera (uses 35mm film) and a 45mm lens for the shoot. Its extreme-horizontal-shaped frame, more than double the width of a regular 35mm frame, lent itself well to fitting a lot of people into a single image. Seattle Times art director Susan Jouflas, with whom I worked closely for this project, had a great idea of piecing two XPan frames together (in the design presentation) to illustrate a group shot of 11 athletes for each of the three teams.
Another close collaborator for this project was sports photo editor Kevin Fujii. It was his great idea to shoot three slices of the athletes selected for the cover page, and then piece them together to create a single, jigsaw-style image on the front.
Source: The Seattle Times