Congratulations to Peter Figen for winning Feature Thread of the Week with 2 votes - View Previous Winners
Here's a shot I did last week of my friend, the L.A. based Dominican guitarist Richard Gomez. A simple three light setup but not the three lights you'd expect. A large Chimera on the left with a Balcar 18" gridded and shower capped in the middle of that and then a Chimera small as a kicker, so the spill from the large box is lighting the background as well. After we finished, he picked up one of my old Martin's, looked up at the giant print of Harrison on the wall and played me Here Comes the Sun.
Richard Gomez
GFX100SFujifilm Fujinon GF100-200mm F5.6 R LM OIS WR lens115mmf/11.01/125s100 ISO0.0 EV
keepclicking wrote:
Peter, that’s a beautiful capture. I don’t know much about portraiture but this image looks so natural and BW really works well. Great work YGMV 👍🏻
Thanks Parul. The biggest difference in photographing people is that you can direct them and hope they take that direction. Richard was very good with that.
Was he there to record, too? Or just the photo session?
Just there for photos. He's recorded in all the major studios and for major artists but I can't remember all the names he mentined to me, plus he's got his own home studio, y'know, like everyone else here in LaLaLand.
James Markus wrote:
Peter,
A beautiful crisp image! The lighting ratio is perfect, and the gradients of your GFX100S are amazing.
Jim
Thanks Jim. It's really interesting to see how the files come to life as you work on them and just how nice the files are from that sensor. By far the best of any camera I've used to date. The only real issue was in that Fuji 100-200 lens is only an f/5.6 and at times it had a hard time locking on to focus with only modeling lights. The 45-100 zoom was much better but not right for this job. And for the main light there were two 250 watt modeling lamps inside the large Chimera and one of the same inside the small dish, so there was at least a decent amount of modeling light to focus by.
GoodEgg wrote:
Great lighting (I'm still having trouble getting a good backdrop light like you've done) and absolutely love the sepia tone.
Thank you. There was no separate background light, just some spill from the large soft box. What makes it look like a background light is the vignetting, which is done in two stages. First I separate the subject from the background using Select > Subject and then refine that using the Quick Mask tool fixing the edges, then floating that up to a new layer and applying a vignette with a Curves Adj. Layer through a roughly circular or maybe ovalized circular mask with a 1000 pixel blur on the selection, and do that Under the new subject layer. Then I'll do the whole thing again on top of everything which adds to the first vignette and adds some to the subject as well and helps me emphasize what I want and de-emphasize what I don't. Plus I wanted him close enough to the background that I'd get some of his shadow on the background as well.
Dave_E wrote:
Lovely image Peter. I love the beautiful lighting of the subject and the soft spill on to the background. A great tone to the whole image.
