Portraiture Course Final Week
October 15, 2010
It was the final part of our portraiture course at Garage Studios last night, taught by Kevin Mason and me.
Over the last 3 weeks, we’ve concentrated on the work of various influential portrait photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Nadev Kander. We rounded off the course buy looking at the work of Larry Sultan, Noah Kalina, and Phillip Lorca Di Corcia.
Keeping in mind all of the work they’d seen over the last few weeks, we set the students the task of coming up with a portrait idea they wanted to shoot.
Follow this link to see what we were working on last week and check out some students images.
I worked with Morgan on this idea, setting up lighting accordingly to fit his night/street scene concept. It was a response to the style of diCorcia and Larry Sultan.
I replicated the light of street lamps and then created the red light Morgan wanted coming out from the door, which complemented the orange glow of the lights outside.
I used 3 lights with wide reflectors attached. There was a light on the left, close to the wall, high and pointing down slightly with an orange/yellow gel attached. I used this as a side highlight for the subject standing by the wall. I then used a 2nd light with all the same attachments, placed to the right of the camera, pushing light into the main subject (Markus). The power was higher than the others, as he was the main focus of the portrait. The 3rd light was medium power, with a red gel attached.
We only had 20mins to set up and shoot the scene. I feel we managed to get close to the idea that Morgan envisaged and am happy that his final image works very well for what he set out to achieve.
If you would like more information or if you want to book on the course email or call us on
Progressing on from this course, we are running the amazing studio lighting part I on 20th and 21st November. Get in touch
Tash
