From 1921 until the 1990's, a group of white Americans who wanted to preserve authentic Indian culture dressed themselves as native dancers and performed in Prescott, Arizona many of the traditional ceremonial and religious dances of the Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and other Southwestern tribes. They were called the Smoki Dancers. Just before the ceremony began, this little girl -- she was blonde with blue eyes -- pulled a goat across the outdoor arena. It was just before dark, and I was shooting my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, with a 500mm lens. The maximum aperture was f/5.6, and I was using Kodak Ektachrome 400 -- the fastest color slide film available for this format at the time. Given the dim light of twilight, my shutter speed would have been 1/8. Obviously, this was not acceptable or else the picture would have been hopelessly blurred. So, I pushed the film 3 f/stops. This means I raised the ISO from 400 to 3200 (400 > 800 > 1600 > 3200). This resulted in grossly underexposed images (this applied to the entire roll of film) because now I could use a shutter speed of 1/60 (1/8 > 1/15 > 1/30 > 1/60 = 3 f/stops). When I got back home and had a lab develop the film, they left it in the developer much longer than normal to, hopefully, bring out the detail in the underexposed transparencies. The color shift -- the warm, reddish color -- came from the push processing procedure. The grain was exaggerated, too, but that gritty look, in this case, adds to the richness of this image in my opinion. I also love the tension in the young girl's body as she is tugging on the goat. I used a tripod to support the very heavy telephoto lens and camera. This is one of my favorite pictures from the film days.
0 Comments