The Concept: The Thinking Woman
The thinking woman, a portrait of a young, blond woman sitting on a wooden box with her legs crossed. The inspiration for this portrait came from the famous bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, and from ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. Such sculptures captivate my mind for their beauty, their complexity and their elegance. With this portrait of our model Valeria I wanted to replicate some of these aspects.
My original idea for this portrait of the thinking woman was to photograph the model in either S-curve pose or contraspposto pose. Both forms were widely used in ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. Think of the Venus de Milo (S-Curve) and David by Michelangelo (contrapposto) as examples of these poses. At the studio were the photo session took place there was a square wooden box laying around. With the images of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures in mind, and this wooden box, I started to try a few thing. After a few shots I was not impressed by the results so I decided to adapt the concept a bit. Eventually, and inspired by Rodin’s The Thinker, the idea evolved to the concept you see in this photo. The next step was to light the scene.
Scene and Lighting
In terms of lighting my intention was to create soft shadows. I felt that subtle variations in light and shadow would make this portrait more pleasing and capture elegance and beauty better. To achieve this I used a large softbox mounted on a studio flash as my key light. I positioned it at camera’s left to illuminate the subject from left to right. Because the model was wearing a white, wool dress I decided to use a grey background. This way I could create enough contrast to isolate the subject from the background. I was careful to pose the model not too close to the background in order to avoid casting any shadows onto the grey background. Once I was happy with the lighting and the pose I started photographing our thinking woman.
Model: Valeria