The things I get Karin to do during Lockdown 2020!
Someone had challenged me to post something on the “Recreate artworks with things you find at home” Facebook page, so I did a bit of thinking. I was originally looking for a Vermeer to use as a reference point but the Annie Leibovitz image of Sir Ian Mc Kellen and Sir Patrick Stewart (shot for Vanity fair) popped up.
It’s not too great a leap for me to sit in as Sir Patrick, I of course have a deep love of Dewsbury you know? But asking Karin to do Sir Ian McKellen was an ask however she totally nailed it. This will be the finest record of her Lockdown hair that I could have hoped for.
We’d taken a car-load of equipment back to the studio the day before but there was still my travelling gear at home which includes about 8KWs of strobe lighting. However I thought it would be better to play it simple, keep with the spirit of the page and see what I could do with a single Arri 650 Plus tungsten and a c-stand. I’d put a gel and a sheet of diffusion on the Arri and it sort of worked. The background cloth is a Lastolite and it should have gone back to the studio the day before. There’s acres of the stuff, looking at this I don’t know why I don’t use it more!
Karin is wearing my father’s Singapore Harris Tweed jacket. He once offered me a choice of hand-downs, that or a brown Crimpolene blazer from Burtons, then derided me for having no style when I selected the tweed. Sadly I can get in the thing any more! Karin got into role remarkably quickly, frankly I struggled to get the absolute pose. Later on it occurred to me that they must have been at a table and leaning on it, hey-ho.
There’s no Photoshop work, just a breeze through Lightroom.
At the time of writing the Facebook post has around 1.4k likes so I guess there are a few lessons in here!
