I subscribe to certain periodicals for one reason: the hopes that I find another epic Dan Winter’s photo to inspire me. While his work isn’t specifically portraiture, he captures some of the most famous actors, musicians, athletes and politicians in a way very few can. Now that our 2010 wedding season has wrapped up, Luke & I are beginning yet another long Wisconsin winter, but we promised we wouldn’t sit idle.  Besides shooting weddings, we love our commercial work and we have a lot of room for growth in this area. Last week Luke took the first step working with some fitness models, but today, I wanted to attempt to recreate Dan Winter’s portrait of Tom Hanks (See the photo in Dan’s Interview with F-Stop).

A quick internet search will show you this photo has sort of a cult following with a million people attempting to recreate it, some are very close while others need some tweaking. It’s important to understand that when you approach a project like this you can never expect to recreate the photo exactly (if you do, expect to always be disappointed, ha). But if you use the inspiration as a guide, you will walk away with new information to use in future shoots. I can honestly say what we learned today will definitely be put to great use in a commercial shoot in the near future.

Here’s how we lit it:

Equipment:
-Canon 5D Mark II w/85mm f1.8 @ f4.5, 1/200th second, ISO 250
-AlienBee 800 with softbox and grid
-AlienBee 800 with reflector and 10 degree grid
-580 EX II w/Honl 30 degree grid
-White Tri-Grip Reflector
-4 PocketWizards
-Brown paper towel
-Masking tape
-A stoic looking friend with fur lined coat

Step 1:
First, Dan used short lighting, meaning the side looking away from the camera is lit so we placed the softbox at a 45 degree angle (maybe slightly more) to the camera’s right and had our subject face it. The softbox was about 10-12 inches away from the subject’s face. To put the light right where we want it we used a grid on the softbox but that wasn’t enough. We decided to flag the softbox using the bags Paul C Buff sends their modifiers in and tape so only a very small square (about 18″ x 18″) let light through.

Step 2:
Next we needed to lighten the shadows on the near side of the face. We originally used a reflector but it didn’t do the trick quite well enough. We didn’t want to use direct fill because it would ad a catch light. We decided to bounce another B800 boomed overhead with a 10 degree grid into the reflector which worked wonders.

Step 3:
The walls in our office are blue, but it looks awful when we use really warm/desaturated tones. Since we didn’t have a brown canvas in the photo, Luke had the grand idea of paper towel! Since I was shooting an 85mm at f4.5, the depth of field was shallow enough to make the paper towel look killer (you can see some lines, but it sort of left a rad texture we liked). To light the paper towel we used a 580 EX II with a Honl grid.

Note on composition: It was really important to shoot this slightly downward to get a similar composition to Dan.

Step 4:
Post processing was pretty simple. In CameraRaw we bumped the contrast and exposure just slightly, made the color temperature very warm and then desaturated the photo quite a bit. In Photoshop we simply removed blemishes, retouched the eyes and sharpened the photo.

If you have any questions, post them and we’ll try to explain. For any photographer, challenging yourself to learn new styles is essential to being better at what you do.