The task here was to choose one studio portrait from a magazine (for example) and then try to copy the lighting, composition and all that jazz in a picture of your own.
Being a subscriber of a finnish metal-magazine I knew I could find atleast something in there. Granted, promo-pics of metalbands tend not to vary too greatly and more often than not they cross the border of pure stupidity, but I took my chances anyway. Call it good luck or pure angelic carma, but I found exactly the kinda thing I was looking for at page eight of Inferno #40 (october, 06).
It is not important here, but I’ll say it: in no way I am a fan of My Dying Bride. I like a song or two but other than that I find their music too dull and dragging. And the singer kinda sucks too. That said, I did like the picture of Aaron Stainthorpe (the singer in question) somewhat, and thought it’d be an excellent challenge for me to try and copy it.
As you can see, his face face is underlit in the picture, and shoulders get way more light. That was the starting point for my experiment.
Luckily on the day of the shooting not only had I a model who could sit still for a long periods of time with that worried look on his face, but also two satan’s little helpers, without whom I might have not actually made it. See, getting shoulders lit from both sides was not a problem, and that soft light on the face was doable as well. It was all three lights together that formed a problem. Either there was not enough light on Eppu’s face, or there was too much light on his hair or (when all the other problems were solved) on his groin area. Nothing wrecks a doom-metal picture like a shining crotch. Here’s a picture to show the problem I had with Eppu’s radiant hair.
My two helpers did an amazing job of holding pieces of paperboard (?) and blocking some of the light from both sides, still keeping the shoulders and arms well lit. The third light – this one with an umbrella – I placed in front of my model, further back than the sidelights and a little to the side (right from me) so that it’d form shadows on the left side of Eppu’s face.
Finally after a lot of moving the lights around and trying to position the paperboard-blockers perfectly, I started to get results and one of the last pics I took was already really close to the original one (lighting-wise):
It was taken with 1/30 shutter speed and the biggest aperture available (f/4.2). I opened the raw-picture in photoshop and tried to get the tones match the original picture. I raised the shadow-level and found out that auto -white balance did a good enough job, then dropped saturation a bit and was nearly done. I only cheated a bit when I darkened the knees with burn-tool, since the legs in the original are almost non-existing. I then cropped the picture to match the composition and tinkered with color-balance because of the greenish tint of the picture in the magazine. I might’ve overdone the green a little, but the tone of the picture I scanned doesn’t quite match the magazine – and I still like the picture (minus the skintone which I couldn’t get to match the original).
Here’s the final pic with a thumbnail-reminder of the original.
