Portrait Photography Scotland – Hollywood Portrait Lighting

I thought I would revisit an image that has won us a number of awards since I orginally photographed it, as we currently have a special “Hollywood Style Portrait” deal going live on a very well known Social shopping site today.

I took this photograph last year after being challenged to to come up with an image that would emulate the Hollywood portrait lighting style made famous by the great Hollywood photographer George Hurrell – Hurrell photographed many of the iconic images that came out of Hollywood and his work was stunning – he used a particular lighting technique mostly using “hot” studio lights and spotlights.

I’ve since become fascinated by that style of lighting and have developed it to the point where we now include it as one of our Portrait offerings presented to clients.

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.

Since that shoot I’ve fine-tuned the lighting a bit and we now use a wonderful piece of kit known as a Fresnel Spotlight Adapter for my Bowens studio lights. The image was then processed using Alien Skin Software’s wonderful “Exposure” plug-in to emulate a “film” look and I then added a little softening to the image to give it that Hollywood “glow”.

Hopefully you agree this is a fabulous timeless look to try to achieve and something that would look absolutely fabulous on a loved one’s wall.

If this is something that might interest you we currently have a special offer on our Hollywood Style Portrait sessions.