Unit 205

The Image

Eric

Description

This image is of Eric, a friend from the photographic courses and the Burton Photographic Society.

The portrait was taken as part of my City and Guilds level three studio photography assignment, entitled Portraits of Photographers, where I wanted to photograph the photographers on the course.


Equipment Used

For this portrait I used my Pentax K10D with a Tamron 18 - 200 mm lens, using the BG2 Battery Grip (to provide a second shutter button, and secondary controls, as well as a back up battery).

The lighting, a single Bowen Esprit 1000 head fitted with a beauty dish pointing towards Eric and two Bowen Esprit 500 heads fitted with light boxes to illuminate the white background, which were all provided by Burton College in their photographic studio, the main flash, the Esprit 1000 fitted with the beauty dish was triggered by a wireless trigger, the other two units were triggered by slave units.  A white background was used, and a chair for the subject to sit on.

The studio set up is shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I chose this lighting set up as I wanted to create the portrait in the style of David Bailey.

 

Method

For this portrait of Eric, the camera was set in manual exposure mode, with the drive mode set to single frame, so that the flash unit could keep up with the camera.  The file format was set to RAW+ (JPEG and RAW) with the RAW format set to the universal DNG format, so that should that I was not happy with the exposure I could correct it in Photo Plus later if necessary.

Once Eric was sitting in the chair a light reading was taken using the college’s light meter, and the aperture was copied to the camera, which was set in manual exposure mode, and to the Bowen Esprit 1000 studio light.

Eric, like the rest of the group, was great to work with and he came into the studio with a few ideas of poses himself.

Once I was happy with the portrait, it was converted using Photo Plus X3, and a black and white filter was applied via an adjustment layer.  This filter gave me full control over how different colours would be visible in the finished black and white portrait.  This was then cropped tightly.