At the annual village car show.
Rabbit tail.
Bizzarrini P538S.
Wide.
Teddy.
Joker.
The ultimate SUV – the Toyota Landcruiser.
UFO.
Schnauzer.
Camshaft bumper.
British and Best.
Lucky six.
Death’s head
Grrrrr.
Beautiful lines on a Studebaker.
Fins.
My 1975 BMW R90/6 and a 220hp BMW race bike.
All snapped on an iPhone 12 Pro Max using Apple ProRAW.
Show me the whites.
One of the fun aspects of my ongoing studio project where local dogs are the sitters is that I can experiment with various lighting setups. I use up to three Novatron strobe heads variously arranged and my long suffering teddy bear, Dr. S., is my model for experimenting in advance of real sessions. The good Doctor is my age and we tend to be like minded. And his fees are reasonable.
So when I first met Sam, as jet black as dogs get, I resolved that only an ultra low key setup would do, and here is the result:
Nikon D800, three Novatron heads, 28-300 AF-S Nikkor at f/13, ISO200.
How to do it.
Dogs in the studio are much harder to direct and photograph than people. They are temperamental, have short attention spans and their movements are mercurial.
Ash, the Bernedoodle, was no different. (A Bernedoodle is a non-allergenic, non-shedding Poodle-Bernese Mountain Dog mix). She was very active, hopping on and off the posing platform, the owner had at best marginal control of his pup and, unusually, the dog proved very sensitive to the strobes going off.
Here is the studio setup:
And here is the result:
The posing platform is elevated 8 inches from the floor to permit a smooth contour in the backdrop, and comprises a plywood sheet on a steel base, raised on cement breeze blocks. It is very robust.
To get that gaze I had the owner lie on the floor in front of me with a doggie treat. That got the dog square on to the camera. Then one squeeze on the squeaky toy in my hand saw Ash elevate her gaze and Click!, the image was made.
Dogs with long step muzzles, like Ash, pose a focus problem in this sort of pose, so the optimal spot focus point (forget all that matrix focus gobledegook – the camera has no idea what it should focus on; use spot focus, lock, recompose) is midway between the nose and the eyes. You want both sharp. And I use f/11-16 to increase depth of field, adjusting ISO and lighting intensity to permit use of a small aperture.
Using continuous lighting in this environment is an exercise in futility. You need flash to freeze motion and obtain the best definition. I tether the camera to a wall mounted monitor, using an ancient MacBook Air, with a cable and see the results pop up in Lightroom in a couple of seconds, allowing both photographer and owner to judge lighting, pose and exposure. A far better alternative to chimping that minuscule LCD on the back of the camera.
And while you can easily spend over $1000 on a three light studio strobe system, replete with rechargeable batteries (one more thing to go wrong) I use my 30 year old hard-wired Novatron outfit which can be found for far less on eBay. I wrote about that some two decades ago here and the remote flash trigger I use, which continues to work perfectly, is described here. Tripping risk is minimized by running all the wires under the place rug you can see above.
And you can forget your fancy 85mm portrait lens. What is called for is a wide range zoom and maximum aperture is irrelevant because even on half power the Novatron strobes only require f/11-16 at ISO200. My lens of choice is the 28-300 AF-S Nikkor and the results in a big print will knock your socks off. I use a Nikon D800 and find that fixed focal length lenses are of little use with dynamic dogs as subjects.
To learn about studio lighting I consult just one book – the George Hurrell bible. Hurrell may not have had the benefit of digital sensors and stroboscopic flash, but then again his sitters included Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck.
Stunning work by a Hollywood great.
Adapting the style of illustrator Cole Phillips, the prominent Hollywood Golden Era photographer Eugene Robert Richee captured this stunning image of Louise Brooks at Paramount in the 1930s where his career spanned over twenty years. The Fadeaway technique emphasizes her striking profile, further accentuated by the bobbed hair style. The image was made on a monster 8″x10″ sheet film camera and the retouching was done on the original negative. There was no Photoshop back then!
English gangsters..
The night club scene of 1960s London was dominated by two gangster brothers, the Kray Twins. Identical twins, Ronnie was seriously insane and Reggie just a tad less so. Each committed murders in public and ended up serving a life sentence in gaol.
While the brothers established a measure of respectability after opening an upper class night club which was a magnet to the knobs and actors of the time, they inevitably returned to their roots of psychotic violence and mayhem, their empire ending once they were incarcerated.
David Bailey’s superb portrait of the pair pulls no punches. They are in your face, the submissive Reggie and the dominant Ronnie looking ready to lay about them with whatever weapon came to hand. Bottle, lead pipe, knife, sword (!), gun. You name it. They were not fussy. Bailey grew up in the same poor East End of London as the Krays so he will have been particularly attuned to their make up. It shows.
Two excellent movies have been made about the Twins. The deeper psychological portrait is to be found in The Krays where the Kemp brothers from the rock group Spandau Ballet deliver insightful performances. The more recent offering, Legend, sees Tom Hardy deliver a tour de force performance, acting both brothers. The script is less nuanced but the movie is worth watching for Hardy alone.
Bailey’s picture haunts me to this day. The other week I was taking some studio portraits of a pair of Welsh Terriers owned by friends and, well, I couldn’t help but plagiarize Bailey’s composition. Buckley, the male at left is clearly submissive, while Tilly, the female is the dominant one of the pair.
Welsh Terriers were bred to flush out badgers whose setts (underground homes) would cause foxhunting horses to break legs. You probably should not mess with these boys any more than you would with the Kray Twins.