#willbphoto

Back in April I shot portraits of Game of Thrones cast member Iwan Rheon for the cover of Status Magazine. We shot in Studio 141 in West London, an amazing old art studio owned by my friend James Vaulkhard. Stepping into this place is like going back 60 years. There’s barely anything in there thats modern and some of the artist equipment is easily over 80 years old. 

The magazine required around 6-8 different set ups and I’m going to break down the two of them (shown above) and give you an idea of the lighting set ups along with the retouching.

Firstly here’s an idea of the man power behind this shoot. 

1 x Photographer

1x Photo assistant

1x Clothing Stylist

1x Hair/grooming stylist

1x Actors Agent

1x Someone’s intern but no idea who’s.

SHOT ONE

I knew this portrait wouldn’t get published by the magazine but I shot it anyway for my own enjoyment and for syndication purposes. STATUSmag wanted to aim away from Iwan’s incredibly dark and twisted G.o.T character (Ramsay Bolton) which I totally agreed with, however, he accidentally adopted this sinister pose that which I couldn’t resist shooting. Provided it’s not causing any one more work, why not get a little of bit of what you want as a photographer along with what the client wants? After all you can still hand it in and see if they like it.

Here’s the shot straight out of camera...

Camera: Canon 5dmk3 Lens: 50mm Shutterspeed: 1/60 Aperture: F/8 ISO: 200

SET UP & LIGHTING

1x Home made canvas backdrop in dark grey.

1x  5′7 successful TV actor

1x wooden desk

Key Light:One 600w Einstein into a 46″ Photek Softlighter to camera right. About 4ft from Iwan and feathered across the front of him rather than directly at him. I also flagged off the softlighter so that the light wouldn’t fall so much onto the right side of the backdrop. 

Fill light: One 600w Einstein into a medium deep Elinchrom Rotalux slightly to camera left

RETOUCHING

Warming of skin tones by adding a little more yellow to the highlights using the Blue channel in Photoshop Curves. 

Raising and lowering of highlights and shadows for added pop using a new layer set to Softlight and painting either black or white with a very soft brush. One of my prefered dodge&burn techiques. 

Cooling down of shadows by adding a little more blue and cyan into darker areas using curves Blue channel and curves Red channel respectively. 

After getting the colour tone I wanted, I darkened the table and took some of the orange tone out of the wood as it was too bright and saturated before. 

Lastly I sharpened Iwan’s eyes slightly using High-Pass and then added a layer of subtle grain to take that excessively digital edge off the shot. 

SHOT TWO

This was the first set up we shot that day and my favourite set up from the series that was published. 

Here’s the shot straight out of camera...

Camera: Canon 5dmk3 Lens: 50mm Shutterspeed: 1/80 Aperture: f/3.2 ISO: 125

LIGHTING

One of my favourite ways to add some extra colour and vibrance to a scene is to use a gelled light to ad some extra glow from lamps. You’re essentially creating atmospheric light where the scene previously lacked it. In this case we used a tight beam from a strobe with an orange gel. 

Key Light: 1x 600w Einstein into a 46″ Photek Softlighter boomed to camera left and slightly to the left of Iwan too (see nose shadow).

Rim Light: 1x 600w Einstein into a 7″ gridded reflector with a 1/2 CTO gel on it. Aimed mostly at the back wall but spilling slightly onto the left side of Iwan. 

RETOUCHING

Slight darkening of the whole image. 

More blue and cyan into the shadows by using Colour Balance.

My Smart-Vignetting technique to make Iwan pop slightly more from his surroundings. This is done by pulling the exposure down slightly in curves and adding a layer mask. Then make a loose selection around your subject and invert the layer mask again to bring that selection back to its former state. Gaussian blur the hell out of it. 

I then darkened the floor behind Iwan a bit more by using a black radial gradient on a softlight layer. Adjust opacity to suit. 

A little sharpening on Iwan’s eyes and that was a wrap.

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

Back in October 2015 I decided to take a trip to New York for 2 weeks mainly just to hang out. I’d never been before and had a handful of contacts for crashing on couches across the city. I pitched the idea to my videographer friend Titus who is always down to go on an adventure and off we went. 

We spent the first 5 days being proper tourists, riding rent-a-bikes around Manhattan (trying to do rad stunts obviously) and gradually getting a mental map of the place and where all its famous landmarks are. I also had an idea for a personal project to shoot portraits of New York’s iconic hot dog vendors and all our cycling around was great for figuring out where the highest concentration of these characters could be found. The answer was midtown area. Times Square, Madison Sq Gardens, southern end of Central Park were all great. 

My friend Titus was there to shoot a BTS video of the portrait series and I still needed to find an assistant to carry my lighting gear around on a boom all day. A solid morning of Facebook updates and hassling of American contacts and I eventually found a very helpful friend of a friend to give me a hand.

THE CONCEPT

Fairly simple plan for this one. Wander around midtown all day introducing myself to street food vendors and convincing them to let me shoot some portraits of them. I wanted to accentuate the glowing lights of the hot dog stands along with New York’s incredible natural light. There’s something about the colour tone of the buildings that makes the light down the non-sunny horizontal streets incredibly photogenic especially when combined with the sunlight cascading down onto vertical streets in the background. When in Manhattan you constantly feel like you’re at the bottom of a canyon and the resulting light effects are unparalleled.

PUTTING THE PLAN INTO ACTION

We started off outside the Langham hotel on 36th & 5th and started walking in the direction of Madison Sq Gardens. Before long we could see hot dog stands on every street corner and I quickly thought about my approach. My main aim is to make it as easy and least time consuming as possible for my subjects in all of my shoots and this particular situation required me to be extremely fast and efficient. I failed four times at the start of the day. Everything in New York is busy and fast-moving just like in London and these guys were skeptical about where the photos were going and about missing customers. The hot dog vendors tended to know only basic English and were also worried about their area managers seeing them slacking.

One other thing worth mentioning is that people nowadays have a totally irrational fear of what will happen if a stranger takes their photo. Ordinarily it will involve that photo going online to a pretty tiny audience of people who will give the photo about 6 seconds of their attention before moving onto something else. However, it seems what some people are afraid of is that you’ll take their photo, post it online and their entire life will rapidly be destroyed by a mix of their government, robots with lasers and possibly North Korea. So these days you have to allow for a good 15 seconds of explaining to people that you’re not going have them sent to a gulag in Siberia. 

Luckily we soon had a spree of guys who were perfectly happy with being photographed and the project started to get under way. I had my assistant carrying a 600w Einstein strobe on the end of a telescopic boom, firing into a 46″ Photek Softlighter umbrella. We didn’t bother to dismantle the gear between each shoot and simply walked around all day with it ready to be used. 

EXPOSURE & LIGHTING

I aimed to under-expose on the camera by a little bit and fill in with the Photek. Not too aggressively but enough to give my subjects a little extra pop. I had my assistant booming the light to roughly 45 degrees left/right of my subjects and also aimed to shoot fairly wide so that I was documenting New York to a decent degree. After all, why bother flying thousands of miles and not show the scenery?

Here’s a shot straight out of the camera.....

Camera: Canon 5ds Lens: 24-70L Aperture: 2.8 Shutter: 1/200 ISO: 125

POST PRODUCTION

I had three main aims here: warm skin tones, blue/cyan shadows and accentuated glow from bulbs/lamps......

Warm skin tones: In this particular situation I simply raised the colour temperature a little bit. Super simple. In other situations I might use the Curves layer in PS and add more yellow to the highlights, or perhaps the same technique in Colour Balance however I got what I wanted this time just by pumping up the temperature. 

Blue/cyan shadows: I am such a huge fan of Norman Jean Roy’s use of cyan toning in the showy areas of his photos especially in shots featuring a lot of grey urban landscape. I’ve been heavily influenced by his work since I started out and there’s a little bit of that influence here. On this occasion I opened a curves adjustment layer, switched to ‘blue’ channel and added a little blue to the shadows. Then switched to ‘red’ channel and dragged the shadows into the cyan region (opposite of Red on the RGB colour spectrum). This gave me just enough of the effect I wanted. 

Glowing bulbs/lamps: New layer in PS switched to ‘soft light’, make little radial gradients where there are bright light bulbs using a colour sample of whatever colour that light emits. You can see the added glow from the light bulbs on the hot dog stand and from the cars in the background. 

LESSON LEARNED

I got an email world renowned portrait photographer Art Streiber praising me for this portrait series. It was one of the best emails I’ve ever received as I’m a huge fan of Art’s work. He wanted to help me get this series printed in New York magazine and I jumped for joy around my studio. He then asked if I had got the contact details for each subject and a little mini interview to go with each of them. I didn’t have either of these things. Due to my excessively polite Englishness I didn’t want to waste another minute of their time and didn’t bother to have release forms signed or get any story to go with each person. 

The mini interviews would have made my project carry so much more weight when it comes to having it published and without the clearance from each subject I stood no chance. It could have been done so easily using an ipad with a release form app and something to record audio. 

Art Streiber rightfully gave me a schooling for this. I felt like I’d let down one of my heroes and it’s taught me a valuable lesson to slow down, be more thorough and make sure when doing solo projects that I am entirely my own producer and journalist. 

So off I go in a few months to re-shoot the street food vendors and attempt to get this project printed in the US national press!

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

          The brand new portfolio book has arrived!

The new portfolio book is here and I'm really looking forward to showing it to many of you and hopefully plenty of new clients as well.

It's been too long since I've had an up to date print portfolio and I've been sick of showing up to client meetings with a laptop. Photographic work always looks better in print and it's so much more interesting to browse through an actual book rather than a digital slideshow. 

I went to see Cathy Robert  in her amazing studio between Farringdon and Angel. She showed me all the materials and colours I could use and we eventually landed on something I really liked. I went with A3-plus which is a great size for viewing the photos and not so huge that it'll never leave the office. 

            Film scans - Val D'isere Jan '14

                              LONDON BASED RAPPER - SUFFICE 

Here's some examples from my shoot with London based rapper - Suffice. He fronts a 3 piece hip hop band under the same name. Check their work out here. I'm a huge fan of the band and have been photographing them since they started. One of my favourite aspects of the band is that they are actually a proper band. They use proper drums and guitars etc in both their live and studio work and they put on one hell of a gig. Its so refreshing to see a hip hop act recording music that sounds live rather than substituting the drums for synthetic beats in the studio. Go check them out if you're in London. 

I did a personal shoot last week with a model from Mode agency called Georgia Heap. We shot in the park near my house in south London and my main aim was to use one of my huge backdrops with the sun shining through it from behind. I've got so used to having my strongest light on the subjects face and wanted to do something where the light behind the model was stronger than from the front.