Studio Photography - Photo Recreation Assignment

The objective of this assignment was to research a chosen portrait image, deconstruct how the image was created from lighting to expression, and attempt to recreate it in our own home set up. The image I chose to recreate was by British photographer Colin Crowdey, in which he uses one light source to create a beautiful image. Although Crowdey doesn't disclose how he created the image using only one light, I decided I would be true to the source material and do the same with my image, use one light.

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Original Image

Recreated Image

1/8 f5 44mm

At a glance, I believe I have successfully recreated this image to the best of my abilities given my work environment. Using a single soft box and diffuser positioned to above the model and ever so slightly to the left, I positioned the model and frame until I was happy with the light coverage. I positioned a light reflector below the model's chest in order to get a nice bounced light under their hand and chin.

With the camera positioned on a tripod I lowered the shutter speed to 1/8 in order to have the unlit parts of the model's head exposed, and captured the image. In Lightroom, I then simply changed the colour profile to monochrome and slightly bumped the contrast to match the original image as closely as possible.

I did unfortunately use center weighted metering for this image, which resulted in the models hair appearing slightly out of focus, matrix metering would have been more successful here. I also may have been a bit too heavy handed when adjusting the image contrast and although I am generally happy with my overall result, I would like to revisit the image in future when I have an easier work environment.

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