Posts from — August 2008

 

 

 

Hello everyone, so sorry it has been such a long absence, but things have been incredibly busy around here.  I’ve shot a number of projects with the RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera, (#213 for those of you who care) and hope to be writing about those experiences, workflow issues etc. very soon.

However, at the moment I thought you guys might be interested in a photograph I made last week.

I have been working on a project for quite a few months now photographing artists for an “Artists Trail” project that a group has gotten funding to create. The portraits will be used to promote the trail through the state tourism bureau.

I’ve completed five portraits so far and just did this one last week. I try as best I can to capture some “essence” of the artist. With that in mind I have no preconceived ideas when I go to an appointment.

I like to try to react to what I feel and see when meeting the person and seeing their space for the first time.

Gus Kermes is 84 years old. A long life in art, ranging from his days of layout and design, both graphic and industrial at New Holland Tractor Company to his ever present work in fine art. He also has quite an interest in antiques, and all of this is well represented in his lively space.

I just knew I had to photograph him surrounded by his art and objects.

The inner space you see in the photograph had a skylight which I used as the basis for lighting my shot.

There was also a large window camera left in the outer space.

I chose my camera position, using a Hasselblad H2 with a 35mm lens. It was fitted with a Phase one P45 back tethered to an Imac G5 workstation.

I placed one flash head inside the inner space pointed into the close left corner to add to Gus’s illumination which was otherwise all coming from the top skylight.

I spent about an hour photographing him in various positions, seated , standing etc. until I felt I had something.

I returned to the studio and loaded my session into Capture One. This frame was the obvious winner. I felt it truly captured him in a great body attitude and appearing to be examining his work. The pose was arrived at by my observing him standing as you see him during a quite moment, and remembering it, then coaxing him back into it when I was shooting.

The overall exposure was good, but lacked detail in the outer room’s shadow areas, and the bright area he is looking at was very bright as it happened to be getting hit by a direct bolt of sunlight.

I processed the file three ways, once for the normal, once for the shadows and once for the bright area. In Photoshop I stacked the processed Tiff’s and layer masked to reveal the areas I wanted.

 

The flattened file was good, manageable but lacked drama and contrast. But keep in mind, this was my intention at this step in the post process, as I had in mind my later steps.

Next I duplicated the blue channel, and copied and pasted it into a layer on top of the original, ran a pretty aggressive high radius, low amount unsharp mask on that layer and set it to luminosity.

 

 

After that some selective denoising using noise ninja was needed as this file was shot at ISO 400. I simply used the lasso tool to draw loose selections well feathered and then removed the noise.

Then began a process of isolating various elements in the photo and brightening or darkening them, and lots of Burning and Dodging using a mid gray softlight layer.

Sorry, I have no screen shots of these steps, as they move pretty rapidly and it is somewhat of an intuitive/interactive process, pushing and pulling, you know?

Finally, I increased overall saturation by about +8

Hope you enjoy!

As always questions are welcome.

Check out my interview on www.studiolighting.net. It is a cool website for info.

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

 

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