Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Try to be like the turtle – at ease in your own shell. —Bill Copeland
You know that any quote about turtles would get my attention, didn’t you? For information about Tortuga Racing—tortuga is Spanish for tortoise or turtle—you can read about the team’s origins and its current status on my car photography blog.
Where Do I Find Inspiration?
It’s been my experience that photographers find inspiration for their work from many sources. One of my friends discovers it in old master’s paintings. I get some but not all of the inspiration* for my images from the movies, especially classic films.
My friend and former Managing Editor of Photomethods magazine, John Hamilton—follow him on Instagram —@johnchamiltonauthormn— is also a film buff and once asked me, “if you could watch any movie right now, what would it be?” He told me not to give a standard answer like Citizen Kane, so what movie would it be? My immediate answer was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension but that would not be my answer today. If he asked me the same question today, it would be Frank Capra’s 1937 classic film Lost Horizon.
I recently re-watched the film for the who-knows-how-many times and was struck not only by the cinematography of Joseph Walker and Elmer Dyer but also by quality of the still images that were used to illustrate a “making-of” video on the disc and were shot by on-set photographers using 4×5 cameras. This was truly the golden age of Hollywood still photography. All this was going through my head when I was making today’s featured portrait of Pam Simpson.
How I Made this Portrait: This portrait of Pam dressed in black and silver, with those oh-so Louise Brooks bangs started out as a color JPEG that you can see above right and was made before my current JPEG+RAW regimen. The lighting consisted of a Wafer HexOval 100 (37.5 x 27.5 by 12 inches deep) soft box that mounted using a Balcar speed ring to a Paul C Buff DigiBee 800 monolight. It was placed at camera left and close to Pam. A Paul C Buff Alien Bee, without any reflector was placed low and at camera right, slightly behind her for some subtle backlighting. The backdrop is a 5×7-foot Black Savage Infinity vinyl.
For reasons I don’t remember —camera problems?—I shot this portrait using my wife’s former Nikon D5100 DSLR. (She’s has updated to a mirrorless Nikon Zfc.) The lens used was the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens at 55mm with an exposure of 1/200 sec at f/9 and ISO 200. Using Photoshop, the image was cropped from its original 3:2 aspect ratio to 4:3 because I liked the way it tightened up the portrait’s composition. After some light retouching, the original color file was converted to monochrome using Silver Efex before adding a bit of soft focus from the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex.
Posing tip: I wanted Pam’s pose to be somewhat stagy, like movie production shots of the ‘30s and 40’s. When I work with models in the studio, I like to show them some—key word—of the photographs we’re making on the camera’s LCD, so she can see how she looks. This can give her confidence in what we’re trying to accomplish as wells as stimulate her to think about ways to improve the pose. Glamour photography, much like making movies, is a collaborative process and the more the model is involved the better the results will look.
*Special Note: For some other perspectives on photographic inspiration and a wealth of other photo-related topics, please check out my new YouTube podcast with Barry Staver.
My book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon for $19.03, with used copies selling for around six bucks as I write this. That’s cheaper than a Starbucks latte, so get’em while you can. Sorry, there’s no Kindle version for those preferring a digital version.