The light of masters….

Yeah it sound cool right?
But in reality I really mean this.

Today…
We take a look at the light of masters.
The really old vintage way of photography.
Or in other words today it was time for the workshop “Classical Lighting” with our model Joke.

In this workshop I take the attendees with me on a journey in time.
We talk about film noir photos (see the blog post on Monday), we talk about great names like Hurrell, Harcourt, Avedon, Newton etc. But it’s not only talk. During the workshop I show the group several lighting setups where we work with harder light sources, loads of flags and of course…. well shadows.

Today some of the images we shot during the first set.
Somehow Joke reminded me of Princess Diana here.

Lighting was kept really simple
One Beauty dish with a grid and…. well that’s it.
Conversion is done in Alien Skin 3 with a mix of BW and a slight glow.
You can get my presets for for example Alien skin here

Now of course this was not the only thing we did.
When we talk about vintage photography I always love to add a very simple white background setup where we actually let the background drop down all the way to almost black and leave the ground a bit grayish, for this I use a 1 MTR softbox with a grid and aim it down at the model. In modern times we ofcourse like to freeze motion with REALLY fast strobes with fast flashdurations but if you want to emulate old times it’s often better to use strobes with a slower flash duration because well at that time they often had a “little” bit of motion blur in the shots. I like to stay a bit in the middle (hey nobody said we can’t mix today with “yesteryear”).