Last Monday night, I attended a monthly meet-up of photographers throughout the U.S. capital area at Union 206 Studios in Alexandria, VA. The featured speaker was photographer-director, Jonathan Thorpe. He’s been behind a lens for many years, but his notoriety skyrocketed with his photograph, “Renaissance of Heather,” which was based upon the “The Birth of Venus” painting by Botticelli. Since then, his image received over 8 million views and sparked a deluge of calls and emails from women, asking for similar work.
“This image sent me into a sorta depression for a while,” he said. Thorpe usually doesn’t do something so real and somber as photographing a three-time leukemia survivor and making her re-see her beauty. He gravitates more towards happy, cartoony images, not the serious, heavier topics. It was a great talk of how he came up in the world of photography and gave some sound advice, particularly regarding dreams and dreaming: he doesn’t believe in them.
“If you’re dreaming, you’re sleeping,” one of his slides displayed.
Thorpe believes that dreams aren’t very useful, even a waste of time, if you don’t do what is necessary to make them come true. He believes in going out and making it happen otherwise dreams remain just that. Dreams.
At the end of his speech there was a raffle to win a pair of $100.00 certificates to Hold Fast. Winning anything that is a raffle, sweepstakes, lottery, what have you is a real rarity for me, but I won! So, I sat in my seat, happy with my little prize, thinking we’d adjourn soon to schmooze, go into a mini workshop with Jonathan, or even play around with the gear Union 206 Studios had out. It’s Monday night, I have no plans to do anything stressful and I’m actually a bit hungry at this time.
Jonathan calls myself and the other winner, Elliot (I think), to the front and to bring up our cameras for what I think is a grip n’ grin as the winners. Dramatic music plays and the projected slide shows a camera and says “Shootout!” We’d been bamboozled into a friendly competition without any warning. Elliot and I both sighed a slightly dejected sigh of “are you kidding me?” but we were still game. 25 minutes to set-up, shoot, and edit a portrait using a maximum of 2 strobes — of him: Jonathan Thorpe, the speaker. A well-established and experienced portrait photographer, and do it in front of a bunch of other photographers.
Crap.
I won the coin toss and took the risky move of going first rather than giving myself 25 minutes to beat my opponent. Maybe if I set the bar high enough, he’ll crack, but I can’t complicate myself too much because I don’t have the time. Hmmm…
Oh and by the way, neither of us have any idea what we stand to win from this competition. It could be just to entertain the crowd and nothing more — ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!!
So, here is what I did and how I did it:
Concept: Couple’s Fight
Rather than do something relatively static and with just Jonathan, I decided to do something a little different. So, I looked around the studio and outside for a minute or two and decided upon having Jonathan fight with his girlfriend/wife, played by another photographer, Aleksandra Lagkueva. Arguments and fights between couples can get pretty heated and so I decided to illustrate that with a couch, Jonathan and Aleksandra, and a pair of swords.
Firstly, Union 206 Studios is a fantastic location and the place has plenty of props and knickknacks to help with creativity. They had wooden swords — a bokken and shinai. So, I grabbed those and used them to better illustrate the quarrel. To give it an “at home” feel, we dragged a couch onto the set. I rolled out the two lights (AB 800) and attached a medium softbox and a stripbox. I wanted my main to spread across the frame and I used the stripbox as a rim. My camera was set to ISO 200, 1/200 sec, and f/8. Did that to kill the ambient and give me a starting point.
I had Jonathan sit on the couch and walked in the positioning and power of my lights based on him and how it looked on his face. I ended up at f/10 and was ready once I got my histogram where I wanted. At this point I grabbed Aleksandra from the audience and briefed both her and Jonathan on what they were to do. I then showed them what I wanted to speed things along. We’re about 5 or 6 minutes in.
Everything is in position and I pop off a test frame. Dammit, the stripbox is WAY in the shot and we have an obvious fall-off on the left. Thankfully, the background is clean enough that I might be able to retouch it quickly. I’m already problem-solving the post-production. The stripbox is already like 10 feet off the ground and I wanted to have about 10 to 15 minutes in post to evaluate my frames and have them time to composite if I had to. So, it stayed.
I have Jonathan and Aleksandra feign swinging at each other and actually screaming for over a dozen frames. These were more like half laugh, half screams because it was fun. As photography luck would have it, the last frame became the pick.
Alright, with like 13min to spare, I load my photos onto the computer and start pushing sliders all over the place to get the look as close to done in Adobe CameraRAW before loading into Photoshop for retouching. I would have used Lightroom, but I didn’t want to wait for it to import. Once the image was processed as far as I could get it, I opened it in Photoshop for the retouching and color-grading.
I lasso’ed the right side of the frame, flipped it, and pasted it onto the left side so it covered the stripbox and stand. Masked using the Quick Selection tool and Refine Mask for speed’s sake. The rim light not only provided visual separation, but also gave the Quick Selection tool plenty of contrast to be accurate, saving me time. Masking, masking, masking. And two Curves layers later. Done.
Seven seconds to spare.
My image and Elliot’s went head-to-head in a vote-by-applause and it was seriously close, a tie even. But Jonathan broke the tie by choosing Elliot’s photo. He won a junk camera that was spray-painted gold and bedazzled. Yeah, we competed for a gag prize.
All in all, it was a lot of fun and challenged me to think on my feet, under pressure, in front of an audience of peers and photograph someone who is really good at portraiture.