Fifty Shades of Dan

As I want to create movie posters as professional practice its a good idea to recreate some and get practice in.

Is aw the Fifty Shades of Grey poster and it seems to be simple black and white image with a guy in a suit holding a tie. There appears to be one light source from the lift of the image a creating maybe with a reflector to add the slightest of light on the right of his face or the light to the left in front of the model where it can light his side and will have a slight highlight on the other side of his face. I know aguy called Dan who would fit the role perfect and would be absolutely up for this shoot.

So I initially tried a quick tester shoot on my house to see how much room I got to play with in the shoot and experiment with the light source, it worked out better than I thought but I want spot on. Due to the success of the tester shoot I book out the studio at uni to then give me the space and equipment I need to get a super close representation.

I had the studio space all to myself I cracked on some inspirational music (not fifty shades of grey style) and set up my light I was using Elichrome D-lite 4 with a soft box I wanted to try a beauty dish but didn't have one at uni for Elichrome, on forgetting to bring my Canon 70D I chose to shoot on the Mamiya RZ67 Pro II which I plan to shoot on anyway being its medium format and gives off amazing quality and its a camera that could be used to shoot movie posters by pros so I get as much use as I can.

I was shooting tethered with the Phase One digital back using Capture One.

Started off with a 140mm lens that wasn't working I couldn't get the framing I need so I went wider to 65mm that I made to work it was that or 50mm but I knew I didn't need to go that wide. Once we started shooting it was annoying that I'm looking at a black and white image and the photos I was take was in colour so I added a black and white filter automatically to the photos being capture which I adjusted to get like the original I was copying this game me a idea what I needed to do to the lights and my exposure to get the what and blacks the same tone as original, I took a photo of the black and white setting for the colours like magenta and red blue, cyan ect ect to then apply to edits later with possible post production tweaks.

So got the shot I needed was so happy and we started to try other thing to see what else we can create with the lighting and style of the shoot we was having fun got a female to get involved pulling open the male models shirt from behind and stuff then out of the blue the winder on the Mamiya just went lose so I couldn't wind the mirror down to take photos i went to get the lovely technician who found the proble that a screw came loose and out of plase so !!!!PANIC OVER!!!! we carried on shooting for a little longer and called it a day.

Original By Concept Arts

Test Shoot

Studio Refined - needs cropping and retouch after hand in