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been staring at this one a lot lately now that i'm getting back into studio shooting Walter Chandoha's cat Loco, shot in 1958 his technique involved up to six lights, and from what i can tell he is using 6 here: a main light, a fill, two strobes to illuminate the backdrop, two more strobes to illuminate the cat from behind to give the halo effect. in this one he was probably using his Hasselblad. he ended up having to buy an exposure meter for $500, around $4,600 in 2021 dollars, he says he couldnt really afford it but he didnt have a choice. without it he would have spent way too much time calibrating the backlights (taking a shot, waiting hours or days for it to get developed, making adjustments ad nauseum) and never would have been able to produce the volume of photos he needed to keep his career going this photo is a masterpiece, and even if i do manage to get to the level of precision, technical ability, and patience that was required to take it, i'll still have achieved it with a digital camera and lightroom
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Feb 18, 2021 19:09
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 09:30 |
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this week i decided i will try to recreate that shot, and then i'll be where chandoha was in 1958. after a morning of work, i got here: i used three lights instead of six, i couldnt get the halo with one flash so i had to put both in back and use a continuous softbox as a main light. this made it really difficult to avoid a silhouette, but i did what i could. i think the next step (aside from buying another flash) is going to be to position the backlights a little higher and see what happens. but i dont think im gonna be able to get the eyes to stand out like that with continuous light. also he had a tighter crop but that's easy enough to fix either way grey cats are easier to shoot in general, since a cat with white and/or black fur is going to end up with spots that are either completely black and/or completely white. gray fur means visible texture for the whole cat. yes i will keep making excuses for why my shots don't look as good as his that's normal right e: just realized that by placing the flashes higher up, i could put on the diffuser umbrellas without having them in frame, which would diminish the silhouette effect and maybe i'll be able to get the eyes to pop more baw fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Apr 9, 2021 |
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Apr 9, 2021 22:09
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