Young mother with baby. For Women's East Pavilion, Chattanooga.
One of the most enjoyable projects to come my way back in the days when I had a studio was creating the photographs for a series of mailing pieces, brochures, and wall art for a new women's hospital.
This kind of work falls under the heading of commercial photography, which, roughly speaking, is photography for businesses and organizations of various kinds.
Photography for the Women's East Pavilion project was done entirely in my studio. Working with the agency's art director, we were able to line up a number of suitable, non-professional models.
For me, the most interesting and challenging parts of the project were arranging the lighting for each setup and directing the models.
My lighting consisted of a number of studio flash units, all of them in umbrellas or softboxes to soften the light; each unit positioned to accent the subject with subtlety, yet clarity. Lighting a scene well was for me the most challenging, yet enjoyable aspect of commercial photography.
Since this was before the days when digital cameras made everything easy, I had to visualize the effect of the lighting in my head. I checked the output of each flash with a flash meter, and when I felt I had the lighting properly balanced, put a Polaroid back on the camera and did a test shot.
Two friends arranging flowers. For Women's East Pavilion, Chattanooga.
Yep, that was how we did it. Professional medium and large format cameras had removable film backs that could be replaced by backs made to hold Polaroid film. We made whatever changes to the lighting the Polaroid test shots indicated, and when the tests looked good, put a back loaded with regular film on the camera and fired away.
So we did all this work with light without ever being able to actually "see the light" until the film came back from the laboratory!
(The Women's East Pavilion photography won a number of awards from the Chattanooga Advertising Federation.)
The photos: Both shots were made with a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera, the Mamiya-Sekor 127mm lens, and Fujichrome 100D film.
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Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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