In this article, I’m going to lay out the details of my David Bowie inspired shoot that I did with Nashville artist Mandy Berry back in 2019. I want to share the details of this session because of the multiple layers of detail that had to come together for this shoot. To produce the results we were looking required very specific lighting, makeup, raw processing, and some image compositing.

The idea for this shoot came from Mandy texting me that she’d like to do a shoot inspired by David Bowie, specifically the Heroes album cover and session photos. I leapt at the chance to create with her on this project because (A), I’m a huge fan of David Bowie and (B), I’d shot with Mandy before, and she’s a superstar in front of the camera.

Below are a couple of the contact sheets from Masayoshi Sukita’s shoot with David Bowie for the Heroes album cover. In the upper right corner of the first sheet, you can see the image that was finally chosen for the album cover. Head to this link to see more of the work Sukita did with Bowie. It’s worth the look!

The setup for the BLJ (black leather jacket) series was fairly straightforward. We set up a table and chair where she could sit and rest her elbows. The background is a Savage Light Gray Washed Muslin which received only some incidental light, making it appear much darker than it looks in person. Lighting was simple with a 22″ beauty dish with grid above and to camera left and the background was lit using a 7″ reflector with a grid. The strobes used were Interfit Honeybadger units.

These images were shot Sigma 56 mm 1.4 lens mounted on an Olympus OMD-EM1 mkII. The exposure was 1/200th at f 3.2 at iso 200. Since the EM-1 mkII is a Micro-Four Thirds camera, the equivalent aperture was close to 6.3 which provides a reasonable depth of field for a portrait shot like this. Keep in mind that this does not affect exposure, just relative depth of field ( it’s easy for people to get in a twist about these “equivalence” thing.)

Once I imported them into my computer, I opened them using Adobe Camera Raw I adjusted the color for a warm tone and then imported them into Photoshop for the final adjustments. Before anything else, I needed to go ahead and do some compositing for the cigarette.

Since I thought that some readers might be curious, the cigarettes in the shots are real, but they were not actually lit. Instead, she was holding an unlit one, and I added the ash and smoke. Below shows close up crops of the middle image above with the original image on the left as shot, then the smoke added in the middle, and the final B&W conversion and contrast adjustments on the right.

The final black and white conversion was done using the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop, versus using the black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop.

After shooting the close-ups, we grabbed a few full and half-length shots before Mandy changed wardrobe. Below are a few shots from that series. Using the same 22″ beauty dish with a grid and a foam board reflector to camera right, we ended up with some moody, low-key images.

Next, Mandy changed into a large, white, button-down shirt for the next set of images. These were more spontaneous as well, really didn’t have a plan for this set other than just having some fun with it. Mandy’s ability to play to the camera really shines here as we captured a bunch of fun images. Other than swapping backgrounds to white and placing two lights on it to create a pure white scene, the lighting remained just that 22″ beauty dish, although this time without the grid.

The exposure on these was very much “to the right” keeping the images as light as possible without blowing them out. I was careful to “just” maintain the details in the shirt while still taking her face just to the edge of too bright. I like the stark effect we ended up with here. Soon after a few of these, Mandy grabbed a bright red blazer and a gold/blue striped tie and this, plus some “extra” raw processing transformed the next set of images.

Using the same lighting setup, we shot a series with her wearing the blazer and tie but after seeing the results, I really wanted these to “pop” and used a simple technique to really create some crunch. Basically, I went “heavy-handed” with two sliders in Camera Raw. I used high amounts of Clarity and very negative on the texture. This has the same effect in Lightroom, as the raw processing engine is the same in both applications.

Lots of Clarity and even more negative texture

To add even more punch to the final images, I brought the images into Photoshop. I then duplicated the background (only) layer, blurred it, and then changed the blend mode to Overlay. This will drive bright areas brighter and dark areas darker, as well as increases saturation. Adjusting the opacity of this layer to around 50% results in the images seen with her in the red blazer.

I understand if this effect looks a bit “much” but I love this look under certain circumstances, and this was one of them. This was a case where I had no desire for Mandy to look “natural” but rather wanted an unearthly and edgy look while still remaining high-key.

Before we wrapped, I put the gray muslin back up and placed the grid back on the dish. I also hit the background with a single 7″ reflector and used barn doors to create an angular splash of light on the background. I had brought along my own Guess denim jacket from the late 80s just for fun, and Mandy put it to work. The end results reminded me of some of the old ad campaign photos for Guess in the 80s and 90s.

I can’t stress how much fun this session was and how much I loved working with Mandy. I particularly liked how we started out with a specific task of deconstructing what was done back in 1977 for Heroes and then creating an homage to it like we did in the beginning of the shoot and then shooting off on our own tangent from there.

Of course, we then ended up have some more fun with what I ended up having little to do with Glam Rock and more about 80s denim fashion. The best part about this whole session is that it was fun. It was also quick, as I think we only shot for maybe an hour at most. As they say, when it clicks, it clicks, and it certainly did during this session!