I often get together with some of my photographer friends to experiment with lighting techniques and try out new gear. Recently, my friend, John, stopped by the studio, and we decided to have a go at recreating a Dan Winters portrait. In this video, I detail my process, including the lighting I used as well as my editing process.
After choosing Winters' portrait of David Fahey as our inspiration image, our first step was to replicate the background vignette in the original image. This was done fairly easily, and then, we moved on the to the more challenging part of the process, which was to replicate the key and fill light. Since we were not sure how the original image was lit, we began testing a variety of modifiers with different types of diffusion until we settled on a bare strobe in a reflector. Then, we added a fill light and a flag to match the camera right shadow. Once we were satisfied with the raw image, I imported it into Affinity Photo for editing and color grading until I felt that it was a good representation of the original image. I used a variety of dodge/burn layers, curves layers, and some overlays created by Ivan Weiss to replicate the texture and dramatic look of the inspiration image. Finally, I tweaked the color with HSL layers until it looked as close as possible to Winters' portrait.
This was a fun and educational exercise, which I highly recommend. Find an image that inspires you and recreate it! As always, feedback is welcome in the comments section, and I hope you enjoy the video.
I reckon the original shot was lit with a 3m Giant Parabolic Reflector, giving hard directional light that can be easily flagged. Hard to recreate
I think yours has lost the connection we look for in a great portrait. Yours is about the lighting. Dan's, you don't notice or think about it. I think if you're going to recreate the lighting or the post? Fine. But the intimacy is gone. That should be the real question on what you are recreating, top of the list