The Concept: Contemplative Woman
Model Louise Hoppel portrays a contemplative woman in streets of Amsterdam. This black and white, cinematic street portrait is part of the Sin City photo session. The photo session was inspired by the movie Sin City and organized by Megan Alter‘s workshop series. The photo session took place in the Haarlemmerbuurt neighborhood of Amsterdam. As part of Megan’s team of instructors I was responsible for teaching photographic lighting concepts to the participants. Besides participating as an instructor I also developed my own work as a photographer.
The inspiration for my personal work came from the film noir and neo noir cinematic styles. These are characterized by low-key lighting, hard shadows, dark tones and black and white photography. In order to prepare for the photo session I spent some time watching the movies, studying lighting patterns and lighting techniques. In addition, to help develop my ideas I study the characters and their stories in both movies.
Scene and Lighting
For this high-contrast portrait of a comtemplative woman I staged the scene on the sidewalk, near a street corner. There was a street lamp post that provided all the light in the scene. However, the available (artificial) light was not strong enough to create the shadows and the contrast I wanted. So, my solution was to enhance the existent light with that of a flash. In other words, I wanted to simulate hard light streaming from a street lamp. I positioned the key light, a Nikon SB-910 speedlight, on the left-hand side of the model’s face. To help focus the light on the subject I used a grid on the flash. This allowed me to control the light more accurately and to make it smaller to create hard shadows. After positioning the light and tweaking it to my taste the lighting setup was complete.
One of the things I wanted to do when lighting the scene was to light one side of the model’s face more than the other. With this in mind I placed the key light on one side of the model. However, I didn’t want to leave the far side in complete darkness. Instead, I wanted to capture some detail and texture on the dark side. So what I did was to position the light closer to the camera lens’ axis. That way the light from the speedlight would light up the right-hand side of the model’s face a bit more. I tried using a reflector but I didn’t like the results as it was lifting the shadows more than I wanted.
Finally, to set up the mood for this portrait of a contemplative woman I asked the model to stand in front of a white wall and look up.
Model: Louise Hoppel