This is from a shoot I did with Emma, an actress in Berlin. We did the session in the apartment of a filmmaker friend of mine who was checked into a mental institution at the time (ach, Berlin, Berlin, so gemein). He had all of these weird props and posters lying around that we made use of in the other shots.

The bathroom where this photo was taken didn’t have a window, and I didn’t have any studio lights or even an external flash at the time. On the bright side (haha) I was shooting on black-and-white film, meaning color temperature didn’t matter too much. So I took all of the tungsten lamps in the house and a fluorescent light panel I found in the attic and practically balanced them on the edge of the bathtub to get enough light on her face. Yes, in order to capture the perfect photo, there is no risk that I’m not willing to take — with the life of the model. We later climbed onto the roof of the seven-story apartment building and took photos of her on the edge pretending to jump off. Why do these ideas only occur to a person while living in Berlin?

One thing I dislike about all the old film photos I’ve digitalized is that before you even start retouching, you have to heal tons of scratches, dirt and burnt pixels. Camera, film, or the lab that digitalized them? I suggest it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. Long live digital SLR, says I.

Added some vignetting with three separate layers of black gradients (one for the top, one for the left side and a circular one in the center) to compensate for the unbalanced lighting situation. Adjusted the opacity of the layers, added grain to the gradients, flattened, fixed brightness/contrast, then burned and dodged a bit.

Interestingly, I wiped out the lines under her eyes with the clone tool (a typical first step in retouching portraits) but found that the softness detracted from the tough look on her face, so in the end I left them as they were.

A candid shot while we were waiting on friends to go to a disco. I’ve always been fascinated by how painters achieve chromatic balance in their works by limiting the colors in their pallet. I did the same here in Photoshop, forcing a pallet of colors of my choosing by using the Indexed Color mode and then converting back to RGB.

Francisco was quite dissatisfied with what he found waiting for him at the end of his chopsticks.