Herb Ritts Tribute - Sort of ...

Yesterday morning I was down at a local garage photographing a male physique model by the name of Danny Bartlett. This was a shoot I'd been thinking about for a while now and was to be a sort of tribute to world famous photographer Herb Ritts and as always, I was being helped by my good friend Barry Payne who was videoing the shoot.

I'd planned to start at 10.30am but unfortunately the model, Danny was delayed and didn't manage to arrive until nearly 2 hours later. This cut down on our 'shooting' time considerably as we we'd been given permission to use a local garage which was open to the public at the time but was due to close at 12.30pm.

Once we'd had a chat about what we were looking to achieve, Danny got changed and we cracked on focusing on just a couple of lighting set ups and here are some of the results:

Shot 1: Herb Ritts Tribute


Shot 2: Profile



Technical:
I was very conscious of not over staying our welcome at the garage as the guys had been extremely generous to allow us to make us of it, so speed was the name of the game which is why I opted to use the shoot thru umbrella. For the first shot, the umbrella was positioned in such a way that it cast nice shadows across Danny to emphasise his definition but also spill onto the back wall and machinery ogherwise it would all have been way too dark behind him.


For the second shot I've put the black cover on the umbrella but only on the half nearest to the back wall. Doing so prevented any light going onto the back wall and allowed just enough light to fall onto Danny. As I wanted the area to turn completely black I've set the D3 at 200 iso and the max flash sync speed of 1/250sec. Light on Danny was then controlled by the Aperture setting which in this case was f/7.1 with the flash at 1/8th power.

Enjoy ;o)