This was the biggest single project I had taken on for the channel up to this point. Weeks of preparation, several late nights making things in the workshop, one afternoon of shooting, ten sheets of 4x5 film and one quietly important question at the end about why I was doing any of it. The honest summary is that I am really glad I did. The honest second summary is that I am still working out why.
The shoot itself was simple in concept. My friend Tom looks like a Viking. He claims to be of Norse stock and the beard backs the claim up. I wanted to put him in a forest in a Viking costume and shoot him on the Toyo Monorail with a long lens, to see if I could conjure something atmospheric out of the woodland light. The shoot was the easy part. Getting Tom into a costume that did not look like an Amazon Halloween outfit was the project.
Why I made the costume
If you have ever tried to buy a period costume, you will know there are two grades available off the shelf. The bottom of the market is the Amazon Halloween costume: plastic, glued, lightweight, looks the part for about ninety seconds in a dim room. The top of the market is the cosplay or theatre-grade build: proper materials, properly made, eye-wateringly expensive. There is essentially nothing in the middle. If you want a Viking costume that will photograph well at 4x5 resolution without looking either cheap or rented, you have two options. You can spend a lot of money. Or you can make it.
I made it. I spent several evenings over a few weeks putting together a leather tabard with hand-cut detail, a fake fur cape that attached over the shoulders, a pair of furry boots built up from a standard pair of work boots with fake fur glued onto them and a staff whittled from a length of two-by-four. The staff is the piece I am most pleased with. I stained it with tea and coffee for the colour, then with vinegar-and-wire-wool solution for a bit of weathering. Then I sanded selected sections to bring out the contrast and wrapped a few rings of aluminium around the top for definition. The whole thing was glued together with leftover contact adhesive from the leatherette glue test shoot I did a few weeks earlier.
The reason for making it rather than buying it was partly money and partly stubbornness, but mostly that the thing I wanted did not exist for sale at any price. The Amazon costume would have ruined the photographs. The high-end build would have eaten the budget for the whole rest of the year on the channel. The only way to get something between the two was to put the time in myself.
The plan
The shooting plan was straightforward. A dense forest setting with low-lying mist, Tom in full costume holding the staff, a long focal length at 4x5 to compress the woodland behind him into a textured background and some smoke grenades to fake the mist if the actual weather did not cooperate. I had scouted a forest a couple of miles from the house that had the right tree density. I had bought smoke grenades for previous shoots and I knew they were unreliable but I packed them anyway.
I chose the Toyo Monorail for the camera. The Intrepid is wonderfully portable and I take it everywhere on foot, but I could drive the car all the way up to this location and the Toyo is significantly more stable on a tripod with a long lens than the Intrepid is. The Toyo also has more movement than the Intrepid, and I knew I was going to want some front rise and front tilt for the look I had in my head.
For lenses I packed the Nikkor 210mm f/5.6, which is the workhorse I use for most of my 4x5 work. I also packed something more interesting. An unbranded Dallmeyer 8.5 inch f/4.5 anastigmat that I had picked up at auction a few weeks earlier without knowing exactly what it was. The lens is marked Dallmeyer and 8.5 inch and f/4.5 and anastigmat, and that is the entire inventory of information I have. No serial number that I could decode, no series name on the barrel. If anyone reading this can identify the lens I would love to know more. It had not been on a camera since I bought it and I wanted to give it a run.
For film I packed twelve sheets: six of FP4 Plus and four of Ektar 100. I knew I would mostly want black and white for the mood, with a couple of colour frames at the end if there was anything worth shooting in colour.
The shoot
Tom arrived. We got him into the costume. He had plaited his beard for the occasion, which was a seriously committed move and immediately raised the bar for what I had to deliver on the photography.
The smoke grenades were the first failure. I had brought enough of them and I knew they only burn for about forty-five seconds, so I had a plan for when to set each one off relative to setting up the frame. The plan held up for about thirty seconds. The wind picked up and shifted to the wrong direction and the smoke went the opposite way to where Tom was standing. I had been here before with smoke grenades and I should have known better. With only two of us on location, the photographer and the model, there was nobody to waft the smoke into the frame. An assistant could have saved most of them. We pressed on without.
I set up the Toyo for the first frame with the Nikkor 210mm. I wanted an ethereal, fantasy-edged look, so I added some front rise and tilted the front standard forward. The effect on the ground glass was immediately interesting. The plane of focus tilted off the vertical, which softened parts of the background while keeping Tom’s face and the upper part of his body sharp. At f/8 and a 15th of a second on FP4 the exposure was straightforward.
The frame I am happiest with from the Nikkor came after we had moved into a deeper part of the wood. Tom sitting on a log, visibly tired by then, with the staff resting across his knees. Tight head and shoulders frame, with soft directional light from a gap in the canopy. The thing about photographing someone you have known for years is that you can ask them to stop performing for the camera and they will actually do it. The portrait reads.
Then I changed to the Dallmeyer.
The Dallmeyer
The Dallmeyer was the wild card and turned out to be the highlight of the day. It is an old uncoated lens, probably late 19th or early 20th century given the design, and crucially it has no shutter. The aperture diaphragm works but there is no leaf shutter behind it. The way you make an exposure with a lens like this is by removing the lens cap for the right amount of time and putting it back on. This is fine for slow film and stopped-down apertures, and it is genuinely how all photographs were made before about 1910.
I worked out the exposure by metering as normal then converting from the Nikkor’s reading. At f/16 on the meter for a quarter of a second, with a bellows extension factor (the Dallmeyer has a slightly different node position from the Nikkor) of roughly half a stop, I needed about half a second through the Dallmeyer. Cap off for half a second, then cap back on.
The frame came back as something I did not know I wanted. The Dallmeyer renders Tom’s face in a softness that the Nikkor cannot reproduce. There is a halo of slightly diffused light behind him, the kind of thing modern lenses are corrected to eliminate, that gives the portrait an atmosphere of being from a different century. The lens is not sharp in the modern sense. It is sharp enough where you want sharpness, on Tom’s eyes, and then it lets go in the way that uncoated lenses of this vintage do. I had been a bit lukewarm about the lens before this shoot. After it I am really excited about what it can do.
We shot two frames on the Dallmeyer and then I moved to the Ektar for the final couple of frames in colour. The colour frames work, but the day belongs to the Dallmeyer in monochrome.
Why am I doing this?
This bit is the bit I want to talk about properly, because in the weeks leading up to the shoot more than one person asked me, sincerely and not unkindly, why I was putting so much effort into a thing that nobody was paying me for. The implication of the question, although nobody said it outright, was that the effort-to-output ratio looked irrational. Weeks of evenings on a costume for one afternoon of shooting that produces ten photographs.
I did not have a good answer for them at the time. I have been thinking about it since.
The honest answer is that I am working something out. I do not yet know what kind of photographer I want to be. I know what I am not. I am not a landscape photographer in the conventional sense. Landscapes do not give me the buzz that other people seem to get from them. I am clearly some kind of portrait or character photographer, but I have not yet worked out which kind. The Viking shoot is one experiment in that direction. The shoots I have planned for the coming weeks are others. Each one tells me a bit more about what I am actually trying to do.
The other honest answer is that the doing is the point. I would have done this shoot whether or not the channel existed. Plenty of the shoots I have done with Tom over the years have been just the two of us with no audience. The channel is a place to share the work, and the audience is appreciated, but it is not the reason. The reason is that I want to know if I can make a photograph that looks like the photograph in my head, and the only way to find out is to put the costume on the friend in the forest and to point the camera at him.
Underneath both of those is a deeper answer that I am less comfortable with but which is probably the most accurate. I do not know what I am going to do with the rest of my life and I think photography is a thing that might matter to me in a way that quite a lot of other things do not. Spending several weeks making a leather tabard so that I could spend an afternoon photographing a friend is the kind of behaviour that suggests an attachment. The attachment is interesting. I am following it to see where it leads.
The shoot itself is a small data point in a longer enquiry. The next one will be another. I do not know what the final answer looks like, or whether there is a final answer at all. The journey is the work.
Closing notes
Tom was an absolute legend on the day. He turned up with the plaited beard, gave the costume his all, sat on logs in the cold for as long as I needed him to and then helped me carry the kit back to the car. There is no version of this shoot that works without him. Thanks mate.
The smoke grenades, for the record, were a waste of time on this occasion. They have worked on previous shoots and they will work on future ones, but on this day the wind was against me and there was nobody to waft. Lesson learned and re-learned. Bring an assistant for smoke work, or do not bother with smoke.
The Dallmeyer 8.5 inch is now part of the regular kit. I will be using it more. If anyone reading this can identify the specific lens from the description I would still love to know what I have.
The next shoot is already planned. A different character in a different forest, with the same camera and almost certainly the same friend. The same question runs quietly underneath the whole thing.