Portrait of an Artist - Paul Flynn (PtII) , A Film Shoot

I mentioned in my last blog It was a pleasure to work with Paul in his studio for this shoot, and a little surprise in this blog, as I'm sure you have guessed for the title, these are the analog film photographs from that day. 

I think these shots capture the mood and atmosphere in Paul's studio much better then my digital shots could have. To me the shots below feel much more alive and human. For those interested I shot these on my Mamyia M645with an 80mm ƒ2.8 lens using Kodak Tri-X film.  The grain and tonality of the film was perfect for capturing Paul at work. While the lighting was low and I had to compensate this with some slow shutter speeds, this gave another human element with the motion blur of his movements. Non the less while we chatted, we both worked away, Paul painting and working on a few of his paintings and me carefully taking shots. In the few shots below Paul is working on part of his 1916 set of paintings.

Fashion Shoot

Recently I was asked by a good friend and layout designer of DCU's Look magazine to shoot some fashion photos for a few pages in the magazine. We were lucky that we have access to a fully kited out studio, with a multitude of strobes and modifiers.

Starting out I decided to use a very simple 3 lights set up, using two large soft boxes on camera left and right and one light to light the background.  I set the lights to give a 1:2/3 ratio to give nice tonal contrast across the faces and bodies of the models.

There were several outfits to shoot, the challenge was to use poses that were fun but were unique across the range of outfits.  I was then told that they wanted some head shots, for this i changed lighting set up to a 2 light and reflector set up, using a beauty dish and reflector in a clamshell set up and the same back ground light.

This set up gives by far the most striking images of models when they know how to work  with your and this set up.  Although a huge amount of work would still need to be done in post to get the effect below, when it is shot with that in mind, it make the post production very easy.

For the shoot I spent 3 hours shooting and then there was over 9+ hours spend in Photoshop and Lightroom editing these photos. To get the look i wanted from the dull looking RAW files, I had to use a myriad of techniques such as dodging, burning, selective shaping and masking to achieve the look. Some images such as the one directly above were edited for colour, converted to monochrome and then re-edited to suit the look I was after in the monochrome images.

To see more of this shoot pick up a copy of the Look Magazine in DCU or head over to my website www.photocps.com