Another in my Portrait of the Artist series today:Â Randell Rosenfield is a founding member of the Toronto-based early music enable Sine Nomine. My wife is a also a member of this group, and in addition to recording their Christmas concert last Saturday night, I was also able to take pictures of Sine Nomine as they warmed up and got in final rehearsal for the concert. In this image Randell is playing a vielle, a forerunner of the violin.
From a technical point of view, it was a challenging shoot. I was using a Nikon FM film camera with a 50mm f1.4 lens. I was shooting sans flash, so even using Kodak Tri-X film pushed to E.I. 1600, I had to shoot at 1/30 of a second, wide open. Because of the slow shutter speed, I had to time my shoots to coincide with the short pause at the end of each upbow or down bow, in an attempt to avoid blur. I am quite happy with the results; there is a luminosity in black and white film that is just not there in digital black and white.
And of course, when taking images of a group that performs medieval music, using a digital camera would have felt wrong. 🙂
My Third Eye 
Amazingly crisp foreground given the conditions you had to work under – the background certainly tells the tale of a wide open aperture, though! We doan need no steenken depth of field 🙂
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Thanks Rob!!
Depth of field was certainly not an option! Makes me wonder how folks shoot with f1.2’s and even f1.0/0.95’s!
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I guess it’s like most things in life – a matter of compromise to make sure you achieve the most important aspect of the task at hand, even if it means having to give up a little elsewhere.
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