The first day that I arrived in Perugia, Italy at the Villa that I would call home for the next 7 weeks, I was graciously allowed to attend a photoshop conference held by Andrzej Dragan. These workshops are very expensive to attend, so being allowed to go to it all day for free was an offer i could not resist. Luckily the whole thing was presented in English and then translated into Italian, which got a bit lengthy after awhile.
He didn't really focus on how he did the photography, but he explained in detail more about the post production and techniques that he used for this, which has made him fairly well known for this technique. He normally takes photos with just one lens (24-70 2.8 stopped down to around f/8) for almost all of his work. He wants to get a lot of detail in the faces that he will be able to make pop later on. Originally, the photos that he took look nothing like the end products. Most of the time, he will even take 3 or 4 photos and merge them together if he did not get the expression that he was looking to achieve. It takes a lot of work, and manipulation, which you could ultimately say is not "pure" photography, but the end product is very pleasing. He says he will spend weeks on just one photo, which seems like overkill, but the end product, to me, is worth the time.
I thought this would be interesting to think about since studio portraits is something we will be doing and I think that this could be an option to look at in a way to edit some of the photos. If anyone is interested, I can try to talk through different ways that he processed the images.
Hello, I know this is an old post but i would appreciate a lot a deepening on the argument!
ReplyDeleteThank you!