Guestblog Petr Vlk
Today a shot by Petr Vlk.
I loved the story telling in this one, this is something I often miss in images, often images are ok lighting wise and model wise but they lack a story which keeps me getting back to the shot. They only critique I gave on this shot was the brightness of the glow, but that’s personal. So let’s give the blog to Petr who will tell you a bit about this shot.
End of discussion photo
About myself –
Hello, my name is Petr Vlk, I’m from Liberec (north of Czech Republic). I’m a graphic designer by day, so photography is natural complement for the free time i get, as it usually means not sitting at my desk in front of a computer, and involves being creative and using visual language to express myself. I don’t specialize in any narrow subject matter, rather trying to follow simple rule of making pictures – it has to have visual impact, be it strong colors in object details, interesting light in a portrait, imaginative storyline in staged scene, extreme skills in a sport photo or great view in a landscape picture. Of course I fail this rule a lot, but as a hobbyist, I get to enjoy the luxury of doing it just for fun.
Like for many, discovering David Hobby’s strobist.com was life changing for me, suddenly it opened whole world of possibilities to make the picture rather than taking what’s there. So in the nature of the strobist movement, I’m trying to contribute and give back to the community, blogging about shoots (english – http://behindthelight.tumblr.com/), sharing tips on gear and DIY hacks (czech only – http://svetloskop.blogspot.com/), and lately also organizing local meetups (english – http://workshops.imagiag.com/).
About the photo –
I created this photo during the first local meetup I arranged last year. We did all kinds of photos there from bridal dress shoots to regular portraits, learning from each other and playing with different options the collected gear gave us. Towards the end of the day I thought we should also do few “story” images, and this gangster theme I had in my mind for long time was first choice. I’ve to admit the concept is heavily inspired by the robbers series Chase Jarvis did for Hasselblad few years ago, but I mixed in a bit more of Pulp Fiction/mafia elements.
Fortunately I had this shot on my list for the day, so our model had proper suit available with him, and I always take a toy gun to these shoots (never know if you’ll need gangster twist on things 🙂 ). The briefcase was happy accident, being used to carry some books to the meetup.
The setup –
We had our gangster guy sit at the desk far from all walls, used single Elinchrom Quadra pack (at around 200Ws) for main lights – 66% head in deep octa (on a boom) from top-right, with 1/2 CTB gel, 33% head in 120x90cm strip box from left behind the model. To get accent color from side, there was SB-600 with deep blue gel placed back-right, and finally we placed another SB-600 with gold gels in the briefcase, pointing at the lid (had few papers in there to bounce back). The picture came out pretty close to the final result, just some minor contrast tweaks, and the glow from the briefcase is added in Photoshop.
I also made a diagram for better illustration.
