Caravaggio is one of my favorite painters, so I knew I wanted the subject to glow against a kind of shroud of inky blackness. Hair, eyes, little pieces of textured clothing–these were the things I wanted to highlight. They needed to come out of black nothingness.
But funny enough my fave photo from the evening was not one I was planning.
A few weeks ago I saw several photos of a model simply warped in material an light with only one key light. The simplicity of it really appealed to my so I decided to do something similar. Alica and I had planed to shoot together last year but due to complications it unfortunately never happened, so I took this opportunity to catch up.
Last Monday nights shoot idea was based around using one key light in the same position. I didn’t want to change the position, power output or the aperture of my camera, simply change the light-modifiers to have a 100% comparison between Soft-Box VS Beauty-Dish.
Continue reading Soft-Box VS Beauty-Dish «Soft-Box VS Beauty-Dish»
Last Monday night was Betty Pages 70th birthday. So we decided to shoot a small tribute to her and roll in history. Page was “Miss January 1955”, one of the earliest Playmates of the Month. Often referred to as the “Queen of Pinups”, her jet black hair, blue eyes, and trademark bangs have influenced artists for generations.
Yousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep) Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, “I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.” At the age of 16, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill.
Berenice Abbott (July, 1898 – December, 1991), was an American photographer born in Springfield, Ohio. Best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.Throughout her career, Abbott’s photography was very much a display of the rise in development in technology and society. Her works documented and praised the New York landscape. This was all guided by her belief that a modern day invention such as the camera deserved to document the early 20th century.
Portrait by Man Ray, 1920s
Diane Arbus was born as Diane Nemerov in New York, March 1923. An American photographer known for her black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal”. A 2006, the motion picture Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus, was based very vaguely on her life.
“Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston” is a book I stumbled across on Amazon a while back. Its shows the private collection of New York photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston (known as “Cheney” to his friends and associates). Born April 1885 Cheney was best known for his portraits of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls and actors and actresses of the 1920s and 1930s
Warning the following post contains mild female nudity
