A couple of weekend’s ago Morag and I attended a Photographers’ get together in York organised by my good friend and fabulous teacher John Denton. The event was called MonkeeFest and is a social gathering of photographers and a chance for us to work with some fabulous models to play around with new photography and lighting techniques on our own or in teams. John even organised a visit to Flamingoland Theme Park and Zoo, which was still shut for the winter – so it was great fun getting to run around a theme park – I’ll be posting a further blog post about that one soon.

At the event we were given a challenge by Roger Griffiths to come up with an image that would emulate the look and feel of the great Hollywood photographer George Hurrell – Hurrell photographed many of the iconic images that came out of 30’s and 40’s Hollywood and his work was stunning – he used a particular lighting technique mostly using “hot” studio lights and spotlights.

I’d first been introduced to Hurrell’s work when I attended a lighting seminar run by the great Trevor and Faye Yerbury. Trevor demonstrated how he could emulate the Hurrell look by using a Fresnel adapter in front of a Bowens studio light – he then simply used the modelling light in the Bowens (and a bit of that “Yerbury magic sprinkle dust”) to come up with a stunning image. I was knocked out by what Trevor and Faye achieved that day and promised myself that I would try out some Hurrell lighting at some point.

So, when Roger came up with the challenge – and it was backed up by a prize of a Joe McNally book and a framed print of the winning image from Colorworld – I was definitely going to give this a go.

So below you can see my favourite image from that day’s shooting session.

This image was shot on a Nikon D700 using 2 Lowell iD Video lights. The key thing for me in George Hurrell’s images was the heavy contrast in lighting, so we worked in a darkened room and had the key light on full power and zoomed right in (the Lowell has a small fresnel type lens) – the second Lowell was used to light the background and provide a little separation between the model and the background. Exposure was manual and spot metered on the model’s nose.

The file was processed using my normal Black and White processing method which emulates film as much as possible and I then added a little softening to the image to give that Hollywood “glow”.

I think it worked really well.

What do you think? – Greta Garbo eat your heart out?

Fortunately our judges also liked it and this image was picked out as the winner from the day.

Hopefully you agree this is a fabulous look to try to achieve and something I will be adding to our fashion inspired portrait sessions. If this is something that might interest you we currently have a special offer on our Fashion Portrait sessions – give us a call on 01786 625645 for details or use our contact form to get in touch.