FotoTV Blog by Robert Schlegel

Albert Watson, blind on one eye, has made a name for himself as one of the most successful fashion and advertising photographers in the world. Born and raised in Scotland, Watson studied at the Royal College of Art in London. Since the early seventies he lives and works in New York.

His photographs were used on more than 250 Vogue covers and numerous other publications such as Rolling Stone or Time Magazine.

Many of his pictures are classic portraits of celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, the Rolling Stones member Mick Jagger or actor Johnny Depp. But Albert Watson does not only shoot the rich and famous, he also documents his travels around the world, works on still lives and art projects.

We met Albert Watson in Dusseldorf at his exhibition at the NRW-Forum Kultur. In this film he tells us about his life and the versatility of his photography.

In this FotoTV film, photographer and lecturer, Rudiger Schestag continues his discussion about renaissance portrait photography.

Today we have released the Photoshop tutorial "Renaissance Look" where Kate Breuer explains how to create the antique painted look out of Rüdigers photographs.

In the first film "Renaissance Portraits I", Schestag gave viewers a practical step-by-step shooting on how to go about recreating a scene that is likened to the masters of renaissance painting. This second film is more of a “making of” and an analysis of renaissance painter, Angelo Broncino’s work.

Schestag uses the master painter’s work as a guideline of reference to use in his own photography. Schestag discusses the posing of his models at great deal as it is one of the most important aspects when recreating a renaissance portrait shooting. He tries to come as close as possible to the portrait poses of the renaissance period. Most subjects had to sit for hours, if not repeatedly over a course of days for the painter. Renaissance portraits were most made in ateliers using the light from windows or skylights. To simulate the grandeur of renaissance paintings, Schestag chooses soft side lighting with 190cm octo-box. It is also a lighting technique that modulates the models face exceptionally well. Another highlight of the shooting is the hair and make-up and wardrobe, or lack thereof.

Schestag has his stylist recreate a typical hairstyle of that period, with the middle part being very straight, giving emphasis to a high forehead, curiously feature that was in fashion at that time. Instead of using costumes, Schestag uses cloth to drape over his model. This allows him to concentrate on the character of the model rather than the clothes. It is very interesting watching him work with the model, directing her to pose like a semi-nude renaissance noblewoman and the results are beautiful. Transposing the elegance of the renaissance period to modern time.

Trainer Mike Le Gray shows us one of the major features of Nikon's flagship image editing software, Capture NX2. This powerful software boasts, as standard, NIK Software's well-known U-Point technology, allowing us to make adjustments to our photos, without having to resort to complex selections and masks. If you've ever used NIK's Color Efex Pro, you'll be familiar with the technology, however the benefit here is that it's not an expensive plug-in, but an integral part of the program.

In this first look at Capture NX2, he introduces us to the Color Control Point. If you want to change the color of anything in your photo, simply place a Color Control Point on it and use the sliders to tweak Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it is!

Even those of you shooting brands other than Nikon can benefit, as the software will process not only Nikon's proprietary RAW format (NEF) files, but also TIFF and JPEG files, so he encourages us to download a copy of the 30-day demo, if only to give it a try; he promises you'll love the ease and speed you can make seemingly complex changes simply and in a flash!