29 November 2020

Portrait - Robin


 I haven't done a real studio portrait in a very long time and I miss doing them. They used to pay for the studio I had in Boston especially as people needed nice photos for profiles online. I can get a decent set up here in my home studio, it's limited in size but I can make it work. I would like to dump my old lighting setup for LED which will cost me about 500$ but it might be worth it in the long run. 

The photo is mon conjoint Robin and he wanted some portrait for his Face Book profile so he asked me. Of course he hated every single one when I went through the RAW files to see how they looked. After processing the RAW images in Affinity Photo and the using it to retouch them and make them black and white he finally saw the light and seems to really love them. It is strange how my digital work isn't all that far off from my old medium format work. I spent hours in the darkroom to get the most out of the negative and I spend hours getting themes of the RAW file. It is still a lot of work sometimes to get a decent looking portrait, especially since very few people really have a good idea what they look like. 

I used the NIK plugin silver effete pro to start me off with the black and white conversion but I didn't use DXO photo Lab on these, that seems more suited to landscapes, but that's just my ignorance with the software coming through, I think. 

2 comments:

T' said...

I've only met him once and I instantly knew who it was. There is a LOVELY old Hollywood softness to this. It's both striking and complimentary. Doesn't look "worked" at all. Really nice work. It's easy to see, with something like this, why a professional is worth the money when you compare it to some selfie someone took.

Behemoth media said...

Thanks Wig! Um... Mike! One friend is trying to get me to start taking portraits again for money, but I would have to so it when Robin isn't home 24/7 which makes for a strange business model. It's really hard to do with someone worth no modelling experience, especially now as everyone has the idea this is like taking a selfie when it's much more involved and time consuming, plus there is a ton of post work. This one had 7 layers I think. I think that tracks with my film camera work back in the day. I would dodge, burn, retouch with greyscale retouching pencils and used all sort of filters to get the photo to look good and that took making 5 to10 prints in the darkroom for each image.