Saturday 3 April 2010

L3 - The Horst P Horst style shoot with Becky

Friday 2nd April at 10:00 am - Arranged for Becky, a semi professional experienced model, to come to my house for a studio shoot in the style of Horst's 'Corset'

The ever helpful Eric was also in attendance as my assistant (some say man-servant) to take light readings, adjust equipment and props etc (thanks Eric), Eric is following the same criteria as me in our Level 3 photography course we are taking at our local college and hopefully gained some experience with me.

The Play Book
I always put some ideas and technical setup information into what I call my play book, this is the page for this shoot that I drew up a couple of days before, In it will have the initial setup I'm looking for in this case, It was a single flash with honeycomb and barn doors attached to let me selectively use and direct the light to a particular point almost putting a slice of light on to the model. A reflector to fill in some of the shadows, This later turned into another flash unit fitted with a flash through umbrella. Any changes of equipment or power settings I also add into my play book so that if I have to revisit the shoot I can reference this back and replicate it exactly.














This is Horst's photograph and the style I'm trying to emulate, you will notice a strong sidelight coming from the models right, emphasising the models lines, curves etc. a point to note is that the top of her head, the right hand elbow and the whole of the left arm is not lit, giving it a strong depth to the picture.












This is the first edited photograph, obviously converted to black and white, added a red filter and reduced the opacity giving it a slight tint. I have selected the bottom half of the corset, copied it to a new layer and adjusted the scale etc to lengthen it to cover the exposed portion of Becky's back. A bit of dodge, burn and clone to the background to remove any unwanted bit or light areas ensuring that the main highlights are on Becky.

You will notice that I have not got the lighting on Becky right, perhaps I need to narrow the gap on the barn doors or turn her to take the arm into shadow, I have a few others to look through perhaps there may be better ones in there?

1/200 sec @ f/8.0  ISO 100 focal length 55mm


Becky had a few ideas of her own and she wanted a few shots in a red dress.

So we altered the lighting to high key setup, flash through umbrella on full power at the front left and a background fill coming in from the right.

to finish some cloning to remove background distractions a bit of blur, erase and a crop.






Eric had the idea of the famous pose of Ulma  Thurman in Pulp Fiction, a classic pose, you will have to go to Eric's Blog for that one, It's great.

Anyway after Eric had had his way I caught a couple of other poses from Becky


And this is a crop from the one above .

1 comment:

  1. Aye uup, very good chap. Look forward to my contribution. It is very difficult to copy another and I think you are nearly there with this. I know you have a lot more so look forward to seeing what you nhave done with them. Can you give me a lesson in how to lengthen corsets!!

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