It’s been a really long time since I’ve hung out with a good group of people who love to make photographs and when Levi created the event and invited me along I jumped at the chance to surround myself with good people and good laughter.
Medfield State Hospital, originally the Medfield Insane Asylum, is a historic former psychiatric hospital complex at 45 Hospital Road in Medfield, Massachusetts. The asylum was established in 1892 as the state's first facility for dealing with chronic mental patients. The college-like campus was designed by William Pitt Wentworth and developed between 1896 and 1914. It was formally renamed "Medfield State Hospital" in 1914.[3]
Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, the property was closed in April 2003 and the buildings shuttered. The grounds have been restored, and reopened to the public and are open every day from sun up to sundown. It has been used as a filming location for thriller/horror motion pictures such as The New Mutants, Shutter Island, and The Box.
-Wikipedia
I had never been there before and I was amazed at how large and clean it was. You cannot enter the buildings, but it feels like a large abandoned college campus-turned-nature park.
We all met in a specific location and did the usually meet-and-greets, and then we broke off and started searching the area.
I haven’t had a chance to do much location portraiture, so I used this day as an excuse to dust off a speedlight and my trusty Westcott 28” Apollo softbox and make some portraits of the other photographers
It was awesome seeing so many photographers and all the different cameras. I’ve never had as much Leica envy as I did on this day; it seemed like every other person had a Leica of some sort.
I wanted to keep things simple, so I only brought my X100V and a Polaroid. It’s been a long, long while since I used my X100V with off-camera flash, so I futzed around a little trying to remember what settings I needed to turn on/off on the camera in order to work with off-camera flash, but finally figured it out and I found a nice little area of stairs that I could have the subjects sit on so I could make some portraits.
Most of these images are shot with a Tri-X 400 black & white film emulation on the X100V. I love the grain slathered all over the shots. It feels good.
except this shot of Joakeem above, which looked tasty in color.
I didn’t get a chance to photograph everyone that was there at the meetup. Photographer Tesse Alexandra Shea (https://www.instagram.com/lone_wolf.raw/) brought along a drone and she got a few shots of us before we all scattered around the park grounds:
… and then of course I grabbed a few portraits of this handsome fellow:
Everything was shot with one light in my 28” Apollo.
I also nabbed a Polaroid of everyone that attended the meetup:
Everyone was so awesome and welcoming. I had a blast and I’m looking forward to many more meetups with this group of great people.