Tristan Versluis is a prosthetic special effects artist and also a writer/director of several shorts and a feature (IMDb). I’ve written about him a few times on this site, most recently when I did stills on a night shoot for his latest creation, OMNI, a sci-fi horror about alien visitations.
I was hungry for something a bit different to shoot, and also I needed to break my habit of sitting around playing Skyrim on my days off, so last week I went round to the studio space in Hackney where he works on his prosthetic creations and spent the afternoon shooting him at work on a few projects.
I got to hang out with a mate, get some great shots and practice my lighting all at the same time; pleasingly efficient.
I lit with two Nikon flashes, an SB-600 and an SB-800, fired with the PocketWizard Flex and Mini triggers for Nikon. I understand the principles of lighting my photographs the Strobist way, but I’m still not that fluent in visualising the light I want and how to get it without a lot of trial and error, so I used the time to move lights and settings around a lot while Tristan got on with his work.
(if you’ve ever had doubts about your own ability to light with off-camera flash you should check out David Hobby’s Lighting 101 on his site and banish them immediately)
I wish this was a fully featured ‘How To’ post that showed where and how I set up each light for each shot but to be honest I was moving them around so much and chatting away in between so I completely forgot most of the time. I used a mixture of one and two lights and for pretty much all the shots at least one flash had the Lumiquest Softbox III attached.
The room itself was lit ambiently with fluorescents and some dim daylight. Tristan needed light to work so we left the florries on and I gelled the flashes with 1/4 CTO and found I was getting a good colour with the white balance set to Auto.
Now, on a professional job I’ll shoot RAW and make the effort to find the correct fixed white balance setting at the time as it’s easier to work with in Capture NX 2 than a mysterious wandering Auto. This was just a casual shoot for me and Tris, which is not to say I didn’t care, far from it, but a paycheque wasn’t on the line so I stuck to JPG and what I was getting from the D700’s very accurate AWB.
In the third shot above I had got the Softbox off to camera left providing the bulk of the light, but wasn’t getting any definition on the right. I just wanted a lick of light to separate him and light the shadows on the furthest side of his face, so I took the second flash and blasted it off the white wall in the background. That gave me the fill I needed, and the bright white of the wall contrasts nicely with the curve of the clay that frames Tristan as he works on it.
(You can see the stand the flash is on in the bottom right of the shot.)
Several of the projects Tris has on the go right now are top secret, including an absolutely superb creation for OMNI that I have some amazing shots of but can’t share yet. However, the image on the left below is also for OMNI; it’s a cast of actress Charlotte Hunter’s head which will be used to create a further make-up effect that appears to fuse with her actual flesh.
Up close the level of detail is astonishing; every single pore and blemish is visible and around the eyes it seems like you can actually see the lashes, though of course it’s just your brain playing tricks.
This is just one of several more stages that are required before the final piece is ready. It bears all the imperfections of the original casting – small air bubbles are common. Tristan will now work on this clay mask to iron out all the flaws before proceeding.
Apparently a model’s first reaction on seeing their finished mould is often that it looks like a death mask. Tristan explained that this is down to the way the plant-based moulding gel sets on the original casting; because it has some weight, not a lot but some, there is a slight downward pull on the model’s skin which makes the resulting skin impression appear to have lost some of it’s life, it’s tautness, which a model will notice after a lifetime of seeing themselves in a mirror.
To me, it looked disarmingly like she could open her eyes at any moment.
After a couple of hours of just shooting Tristan getting on with the various things he had on the go, we decided to set up some standard portraits so I sat him in the middle of the room and let him continue tinkering while I set the lights for it. First I set up the ambient exposure because I knew I wanted these to be much more flash-lit than anything else. Then I placed a Lumiquest Softbox III flash camera-right, well over head height, tilting down towards the scene, and a bare flash on camera left at shoulder height.
At first I was getting light filling in the shadows on his face camera-left, but that black top was soaking up all the light, there was no shape, so I shifted the flash until it was grazing past his shoulder in a way that gave me shape in the folds of the sleeve. As you can see I’m still losing everything to the darkness of his top on the right, so maybe I should have gone bare flash on both sides. I’m always scared of using 100% bare flash in a shot though, as if only soft light is good light. Hmm, something to remember for next time!
Still, we definitely got the basic portrait shot we wanted so we tried a few other things. First up, placing a Softbox’d flash either side of his face very close with the rest of the room shut down to black, always fun.
It’s a cool look, and you can increase or decrease the strength of the stripe of shadow by moving the flashes around to the front or back. Next time I’d like to try it with bare flashes, a colder colour temperature and a bit more space in the room (even with aperture closed down, ISO at 100, flashes on lowest power, there’s still some light splashing on the gold pillar and back wall).
Finally, we went for something a little more demonic and did some classic up-lighting with the Softbox’d flash held in his lap pointing up into his face. It was cool but the top of his head disappeared into the darkness so I tried a few with the second flash directly behind his neck firing straight at him but the rim light it created wasn’t enough. However, a few feet over his head and pointing back down at him did the trick.
Check out the inadvertent Richard D. James/Aphex Twin impersonation bottom right.
And that’s everything I have to show you that I’m allowed to show you! Once his creation for OMNI is finished I’m hopefully going to get to photograph it properly, perhaps for the poster. Until then you’ll have to see if you can spot where I’ve carefully obscured it or cropped it out of the shots above…
Cheers for visiting!
