Lighting Secrets

I love lighting -- and two recent assignments from Wells & Drew, a maker of fine, engraved stationery, gave me an opportunity to create a few hundred macro images: tight close-ups to which I applied several different lighting techniques.

Wells & Drew wanted me to capture the fine texture of the paper and show off the remarkable detail of their beautiful, raised engraving.



So to create an almost tactile feeling in my photographs, I sent a tightly gridded and narrowed spotlight strafing accross my table-top set.



For some images, I also fixed a blue gel (something like a heavy cellophane filter) over one of my lights which I bounced off the studio ceiling, to make the shadows go electric blue, while the white spotlight kept the bright parts of the picture looking more or less natural in hue.



For yet other pictures, I went for a softer, less dramatic look -- no spotlight. Instead, two studio strobes bounced off the white ceiling, plus a softbox from the back to give a little directionality and depth to the textures of the paper, the raised engraving, and the fine printing.


For my backgrounds, I used a variety of things: painted muslin backdrops, white foamcore, and a collection of different colored, woven table placemats that I buy for this purpose at places like Linens-n-Things.

Doing this table-top, still life, product photography is the opposite of many of my other shoots -- no models, no assistants, no stylists . . . just me and my lights in my studio plus some of my 11,000 plus MP3s on the sound system.

In My Retro Studio: Hollywood Glamour Lighting

Long an admirer of George Hurrell and the other great Hollywood portrait and glamour photographers of the 1930s and '40s, I've devised techniques to recreate something of that look using modern strobes and digital cameras instead of the tungsten lights and large format view cameras of those days.

Wednesday I shot model Erin St. Clair all day in series of different setups for a real estate ad -- and one of the setups I did was in my retro Hollywood beauty style. Here's my favorite image from that part of the shooting:



Of course the original digital capture was in full color, but I made it black and white in post-processing, then added light touches of color toning to parts of the image, plus some selective diffusion.

And here's a color image from the same session with Erin radiating vibrations of Jane Russell, Marilyn, and Angelina Jolie, all at once.



Hair and makeup by Yajaira Bogari.

Oh, and here's another image I made of Erin with more contemporary lighting:

I Take Lola In My Way-back Machine To 1948

She calls herself "Lola," but that's not her real name. It seems like a dream now, but I think I met her early one morning at a fetish party in an out-of-the-way nightclub in an utterly nondescript, little, suburban strip mall someplace on Highway US-A1A in northern Broward, or maybe it was southern Palm Beach, county -- the last place you'd suspect, but suburbia is where the fetish people really flourish. I was thinking of photographing a magazine story about this underground suburban scene and I went up there without any cameras to take a look.

In dark edges of the sprawling club heavy-duty s & m -- torture, really -- was on dispaly. I was a little shocked, even if they were consenting adults, but I was also nonplussed. Most of the scene was merely theatrical. Some of it was what they call the new burlesque, such as a fine-looking, red-headed woman who was a fire-eater -- like in a circus. She was on stage in a low-cut grown eating fire and snapping out dirty jokes with the elan of an old-time Borsht Belt trouper, but with a stripper's figure, and a broad English accent. And many of the scenesters were merely nice goth kids, playing dress-up, like on Halloween. This was before Abu-Gharaib.

Lola was there, too, and caught my eye. She was a college student, but also performed in fetish shows -- she was friends with another girl, the smoldering hot dominatrix Lady Lexi, who I'd also photographed in my studio after seeing her perform a very enthusiastic fetish routine at the lavish tenth anniversary party of Ocean Drive magazine, a last blast of glossy South Beach decadence before the vibe changed.

In any event, Lola, I learned, collected vintage lingerie, particularly from the 1940s, a period of which I'm also fond. So we agreed to do a forties-style photoshoot a few weeks later in my South Beach studio.

In some of the pictures -- the ones I like best -- hairstylist Pep Arques created a 1940s-ish Pompadour for Lola. And the white leopard pattern ottoman on which she perches was made by Rico Fuentes, an uphosterer who also makes the furniture for many Miami nightclubs.

I styled the overall look of the shoot based on pictures I'd seen in book called 1,000 Pinup Girls (Taschen), which features late 1940s and early 1950s photos, drawings, and paintings from a brace of trashy yet somehow innocent, pre-Playboy, girlie magazines published by a pulp-culture figure named Robert Harrison.

Harrison later invented the infamous, voyeuristic and often vicious Confidential magazine, which proved his downfall. But before that rather nasty period, Harrison's undeniably cheesey, yet in a way rather sweet cheesecake titles -- small-format, small-time magazines with breezy names like Beauty Parade, Eyeful, and Wink -- offered acres of monochrome backgrounds and scantily clad pin-ups, many of them perched fetchingly on ottomans, a piece of furniture one rarely sees these days. Some of the photography in those magazines was badly done, but some was great, as were the paintings. To get the period feeling, I had Rico build me a deep red, round ottoman trimmed with yellow piping, a design and color scheme we copied straight from one of the pictures in the pinup book, and used in some of our photos.

I tweaked the files digitally to give tham a poster-y, calendar girl look that reminded me of the color printing of that time. The year I had in mind was 1948.

I also employed a fairly rare, 45mm, Canon, tilt-shift lens, shifted and tilted to produce selective focus: sharp on her eyes, but a little soft and misty around her feet, to give an old-fashioned, large format camera feel to this period piece of a picture.