Creating the Photograph

Creating the Photograph: Sean Tucker’s “Tudor-Style” Portraits

Chris Gampat
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02/11/2015
5 Mins read

Final

Creating the Photograph is an original series where we interview photographers about a photo that they shot and how it was achieved. The results are some knowledge passed on to you. Want to be featured? Email chrisgampat[at]thephoblographer[dot]com.

Photographer Sean Tucker is both a photographer and videographer hailing from the UK. He recently released a three part video series giving some useful tips and tricks to would-be product photographers. “I am actively building my portfolio in both stills and video to go after more people-centric work in the future because that is where my heart is. At present I am working on a portrait series, as well as finishing up editing on an episodic documentary series which I shot last year in New York, about a podcast duo reaching their 10 year mile stone.” Sean tells us.

He is also quite the lighting wizard and managed to make a single artificial light look completely natural.

But how did he do it?

Also be sure to check out Sean on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Flickr.

Concept

Moonika and her friend Lisa are costume designers for the stage here in London, and they contacted me to take some shots of the new pieces they had made. We decided to head out into the woods out back of Lisa’s house to see if we could get some Tudor-style shots, for those of you familiar with the recent bodice-ripping Showtime series.

I knew in my head what sort of shot I wanted.

The Gear

Camera: Canon 5DMk II

Lens: Canon 85mm f1.8

Filter: Variable ND Filter

I knew this combo would give me the shallow depth of field I wanted, but there was a bit more work to do to get the shot I wanted.

The Shoot

Lighting Diagram

I was looking for a shot of the setting sun coming in through the trees while the subject strolls through the woods. I would bring along my Alien B800 light to act as a fill for the obvious shadows which the setting sun would cast. I chose to use a Strip Box modifier because I wanted the light to have a reasonable even spread across Moonika’s whole length, rather than the fall off I would have had if I used a 1m softbox placed at head height. I could have gotten the even spread with a large 2m softbox, but then I would have had a lot of light spreading across the floor as well. The strip box gave me the most control.

Unfortunately, as you can see from this ‘behind the scenes’ shot, the weather wasn’t playing ball:

BehindtheScenes

No sun.

Flat grey skies.

Not to worry.

I positioned her with her back to the sun anyway to get at least some rim light and lightly filled from the front with my strip box.

I’ll get to how I accentuated the light in the edit.

We had done a bit of walking around and Lisa had discovered a fallen tree. I asked Moonika to stand in middle and positioned myself so it created a natural frame to the image with her standing centre frame.

I also knew that I wanted to imitate a medium format shot, with a full length square cropped shot, and a shallow depth of field. No small task with a DSLR.

Now follow my logic here. If I want the square crop and depth of field which a Medium Format would give, I could get close with a few stitched shots from my 35mm full frame DSLR.

If I shoot 3 portrait-oriented shots, at a low aperture, and then stitch them together and crop the image square, I should be able to replicate some of the feel and depth I’m looking for. So I lined up my first shot with Moonika sitting in centre frame, and then warned her that I needed her to freeze for 3 consecutive shots, including one left and one right of the centre frame, with a small over lap between each so that photoshop would have something to stitch. Here are the raw shots out of camera:

Brenizer Shots Raw

And here is the shot after stitching the 3 shots together and cropping:

Square Crop Raw

Back to the lighting. What sun was making it in through the cloud cover was still highlighting her from behind, including her hair and shoulders, but not nearly as much as I wanted. It still looked a little flat.

Intended Lighting

So with the lighting I wanted in mind I went to work in Photoshop.

Post Production

There is too much to go into detail about here, but let me list the steps I took:

I removed any obvious distractions with the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools.

I dodged the highlights to accentuate shape using a Curves Layer set to Screen, and masking it in.

I burned the shadows to accentuate shape using the Curves layer set to Multiply, and masking it in.

I then went to work on colour using a combination of Curves, Colour Balance and Levels to get the feel I wanted. In short I was looking to warm up the whole image, and introduce some cooler tones to the shadows to create some colour contrast.

I then used the Lighting Effects Filter to direct the light from the rear of the image. This layer only ends up being used at about 20% opacity but gives a nice starting point.

I then created a fake sun in the background using the Lens Flare Filter on two layers, one small one at the centre point of my proposed sun, and one larger at a lower opacity to give the light some depth. These layers were both masked using the Apply Image function so that they only applied to the highlights of the image.

I created some subtle rays for the sun by creating a curves layer with brightened mids and highlights, and boosted yellows, and then drawing rays extending out into the image on a mask layer. To blend everything I blurred the mask layer until I couldn’t see any defined lines.

I burned the edges of the image to pull the focus towards the centre, again using a masked Curves Layer set to Multiply.

I boosted the Saturation of her hair with a masked Saturation Adjustment Layer.

I further corrected the colour, as before, to create more feel after completing the light changes.

To finish I sharpened the image using a High Pass Filter.

Here is the final image:

Final
Final
Square Crop Original
Square Crop Original
canon lighting photographer portrait Sean Tucker style tudor
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.