Tips for photographers: Well I imagine this will become a
long-winded story because it seems like I’ve been thinking about these photos
for months now, and it took five sessions to get comfortable with the lighting
setup and really start making portraits. It all started with Gregory Heisler’s
book “50 portraits,” which I’ve been reading for almost a year every time I
visit my friend and mentor Ken Jarecke, who always let’s me browse his library (as
long as I wash my hands first). A couple of months ago I read about a portrait
where Heisler was praising the use of a ring light to create a “shadowless”
fill light (p. 86). I made a mental note of it, but didn’t rush out and buy a
ring light or anything like that. Perhaps a month later I saw a portrait of
Kareem Abdul Jabar by Dan Winters on twitter and it was so striking to me that
I started an all out binge on everything Dan Winters I could get my hands on
(look at my twitter feed @paulbellinger to find a retweet of the Kareem portrait).
Of course Ken had Winters’ book “Road to Seeing,” so I spent a few hours with
it before buying my own copy soon after. I noticed that for a lot of my
favorite portraits, Winters often used a ring light too. There is a
strobist.com post about Winters that has a behind the scenes video of Dan
shooting Jack Nicklaus and even has quotes from Dan saying that he prefers to
use the ring light mostly for the catch light it creates, and less for fill
when possible (click here to view).
I set about trying to replicate a Dan Winters look, specifically to achieve a
similar lighting effect as seen in his portraits of Tom Hanks and Benedict
Cumberbatch.
