Lighting and shooting 1930's Hollywood Glamour portraits

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Owen
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If you fancy having a go at recreating this classic Hollywood glamour style from the 1930’s and 40’s, I’ve got a full write up of the gear, lighting, styling, and post-production in the Black and White special edition of Photoshoot Magazine out now. You can read for free following the links below. This issue is packed with very stylish looking black and white images covering multiple styles and well worth a read.

..any questions you can post here !

https://en.calameo.com/books/00286860077ce3750fbb1
 
Thanks for sharing, I will take a look over the weekend. :)
 
I did not see any mention of the actual key light?

Mike
As in what type of light it is? It's in the "Achieving the hard light look" panel towards the end. Would have been a good idea to state it again in the "Key Light" para though :)
 
As in what type of light it is? It's in the "Achieving the hard light look" panel towards the end. Would have been a good idea to state it again in the "Key Light" para though :)

I know what type, I wondered what actual model of light I attended a seminar years ago with Faye & Trevor Yerbury using LED lights for similar reasons - have been trying some of the slick on fresnel heads but not getting that look

Mike
 
I know what type, I wondered what actual model of light I attended a seminar years ago with Faye & Trevor Yerbury using LED lights for similar reasons - have been trying some of the slick on fresnel heads but not getting that look

Mike

Ah right - it's a FalconEyes 1600-TDX 160 Watt LED. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Falcon-Eyes-Fresnel-Light-CLL-1600TDX/dp/B01H6APYKC

The Fresnel effectively projects an image of the light source. It's usually diffused as well. Otherwise, with a right levels of exposure, you'd actually see the tungsten element or LED chip surface projected onto your subject. The flash tubes on studio flash heads are just too big for most Fresnel lenses to project small enough. A tight grid can get close though - and the main image on the first page of the article was shot that way - you can see the shadow quality on that one isn't quite as crisp as the others. Speedlights work well for this - I just prefer a continuous setup as it makes precise placing of the light easier.

You can see George Hurrell at work in this video - much later in life
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G7-J0lOncQ
(try about 19:20 ) but he appears to be using the same old lights.

You can soften it up by focusing the beam in a bit as this retracts the LED chip into the light, away from the lens and it fills more of the lens - making that the "source".

The FalconEyes light is not bad for the ~£550 price - equivalent lights from higher end brands such as Lupolux will be about 2-3 times the price. Top end equivalents from Arri start at about £2,200 for the bi-colour L5. It's temperature adjustable as well, and of course, unlike a tungsten light, it doesn't vary the colour temp with brightness. It is huge though, and some of the higher end lights will be more compact, and lighter for the same power output. They claim it's as powerful as a 1600 Watt tungsten light, but, well, my light meter says "no". It's about the same as my 650 Watt incandescent lights. It's also DMX controllable for brightness and colour (but not the focusing which is purely mechanical) if you need that sort of thing.
 
Very interesting Owen, it's always a pleasure to read your lighting posts.
I didn't know about this "Falcon Eyes" light and wonder who actually makes it - Falcon Eyes, like Neewer, just buys up products from factories and re-brands them. What's the diameter of the actual Fresnel lens?

Size matters here. Back in the 80's and early 90's I used fresnel spots quite a lot, sadly I've never worked in the movie industry but I did the lighting for a lot of TV commercials and fresnels were very useful because of the dramatic light quality. We used to hire them in for each shoot and were all made by Arri. They were pretty massive and so very versatile. They were slow to use, mainly because the lighting in TV adds has to be perfect (it used to cost £1000 per second of screen time on LWT back then) and usually took 2 days to shoot a 15 sec commercial, so it didn't matter.

I later used a Bron one, which was an attachment, for still photography. This had a diameter of 14" and was a beast, but very useful. It's still in Malaysia somewhere, long story that I won't bore you with. Back in England I bought another Bron one, which had a built in flash head but unfortunately the generator blew up and I never got around to replacing it.

Later still, I had a meeting with a large studio lighting manufacturer in China. I was the foreigner who couldn't even speak Mandarin and although they were scrupulously polite they obviously didn't want me there. They had a series of excellent portraits on their boardroom wall and, bored stiff, I said that the lighting on all of them was superb and I was especially impressed with the one that was lit with a fresnel spot - that changed everything, their chairman was a keen amateur photographer who actually understood lighting and we had a long and slow conversation via the translator and suddenly I was accepted by them. After that, I became the only photographer who they listened too and I think it's a great pity that the big Chinese manufacturers of today are only interested in making money and know and care nothing about photography.

It turned out that they made a fresnel spot attachment, it was so specialised that it wasn't even in their catalogue but we bought it and it was sold by Lencarta for several years. Mechanically it wasn't great, but it had a 8" diameter lens and did a good job. Other firms then introduced their own versions, the best one that I tried was made by Bowens but, at just one inch smaller, was nowhere near as good.

I've never used a LED one and can't help wondering whether the LED array is small enough to work well - the old tungsten ones were perfect, the flash ones less so because the flash tubes were too big, and with flash there's also a problem caused by the modelling lamp being in a different place to the flash tube.
 
It was looking at the light I got from the LED modelling light on the Safari II that got me looking at LED lights. These examples are not shot with Fresnels but really demonstrate the difference the same lights, in the same place will give you with the modelling light and the flash tube:-

Key light is the Safari with a grid (I think it was about 20 degrees). Shot with the flash tube:-
View: https://www.flickr.com/photos/owenlloyd/33307617814/in/dateposted-public/


Which is ok, but look what we get with the exact same setup, but just using the 10 Watt LED modelling light:-
View: https://www.flickr.com/photos/owenlloyd/33281470323/in/dateposted-public/


Another example with the LED:-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/owenlloyd/31311755124/in/dateposted-public/
New Lights for Old by Owen Lloyd, on Flickr

After that I went looking for something more powerful that could give a similar look.

I have a small (~5 inch) Fresnel attachment made by Aputure for their LED lights. I don't own any of their lights, but they use a Bowens S mount so their modifiers will attach to a flash head too. It is, of course way too small to produce the usual effect you want from a Fresnel, but what it is useful for is projecting a very nicely graduated ball of light onto a projection screen. The focusing arrangement on it allows control of the centre hot-spot. I very nearly threw it out as early tests just resulted in a nice image of the flash tube but just adding some diffusion material to the back of the lens cured that.
View attachment 282732

Here it is creating a ball of light on a frosted acrylic panel, behind a water tank.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CBYjM8Ig5yE/

and some results:-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/owenlloyd/50006768943/in/dateposted-public/

Liquid Gold by Owen Lloyd, on Flickr
 
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