The Classic Hollywood Portrait
I’ve been shooting a lot of headshots lately and while I love this work I’ve been wanting to break out into some other areas of portraiture. One of my favorite styles is that of the classic Hollywood portrait from the 1930’s and 40’s. Images from this period combined high the contrast of strong, direct light with a softness and glow that gave the subject a larger than life appearance. The look also was also a product of the film stock of the day along with dodging and burning in the darkroom.
Yesterday I took the plunge into this style with help of the amazing Katie Galaz. Lighting and post processing is only part of the recipe. You have to have a model who knows how to work the camera with her face, hands, and posture. This is Katie’s wheelhouse and the resulting images from yesterday’s shoot speak for themselves. The lights are modern Godox strobes behind a gridded 22″ beauty dish and an 8″ grid with some tight barndoors to create the powerful and focused lighting. A large flag using black foam core board was put to use to help augment the falloff and enhances the “mood” of these photos.
Once processed to grayscale in Camera Raw, where the lightness of the reds was dropped in the grayscale mix to make the lips dark and glossy, the images were taken in to Photoshop and treated to two separate layers of softening and glow. These layers were in turn drawn in (or out) by hand on a mask to “paint” light to taste. All these techniques would have been wasted without the fantastic model work of Katie.
