Hollywood Portraiture Workshop

For this workshop we were taught about classic Hollywood publicity portraits from the 1930-40's, we were shown the different lighting set ups generally used and how the photographers created the light to show the character and their personality.

Lauren Bacall: This photograph of Bacall's face fully lit with shadows curving off one cheek and underneath the eyebrow suggests a manipulative woman. The background is lit with a single light angled down to imply she likes to be in the spotlight. Her facial expression is confident and looks as though she is taking advantage of a situation; her eyes show a strong and smart character. 

Humphrey Bogart: This photograph of Bogart with his hat and coat on shows that the photographer wants the viewer to think that he is outside, his gaze is into the distance as if he is interested in something else and this helps to further explain his character which was a detective. The high lighting ratio implies he is shady and using no fill light suggests a 'bad guy' character as half his face is in shadow as if he doesn’t want to be seen.

Common stylistic techniques of Hollywood Portraits: steep differences in light and dark tones, the angles at which the shots are taken show the hierarchy of the character, extensive use of shallow depth of field because of the lack of light, blown out highlights in the faces of the subjects, the use of direct light allowed the photographers to carefully create areas of light and shadow.Before going into the studio, I took some test shots to try and perfect the pose from my chosen photograph as best as me and my model could. Below is the final image from our test shots:

Lighting set up: The lighting set up I chose included one key light to light the subject and one back light with a snoot attached to provide a concentrated source of light for the black backdrop. Below shows a diagram of the lighting set up with annotations.

Camera settings: I used the manual mode on camera to allow more freedom and control over my image, auto white balance, set my aperture to f/32 to obtain the sharpest image, used a shutter speed of 1/100 sec and an ISO of 1600. I used a Canon 1100D with a 18-55 mm lens, however used a focal length of 50 mm as the subject is a portrait. 

Post-production: I used PhotoShop to manipulate this photograph after shooting in the studio as I wanted to get as accurate as possible to the original image. I converted the image to black and white, altered the brightness and contrast and created a curves layer to add drama to the image, to smooth and soften the models skin I used the Spot Healing Tool to remove any blemishes, the Clone Stamp Tool to brighten beneath the eyes and Gaussian Blur to soften the skin tone.

The photograph below is my initial edit:

 

Below shows two images; on the left is the original photograph and on the right is my recreation.