Recreating a photo.

Recently, I did a photo shoot for director/editor Joe Harris that involved recreating a shot of director David Lynch. The original shot is above on the left, my final shot is on the right. Looking at the lighting, the key light seems to be almost directly above the subject and if I was to guess, I would say it was a beauty dish. Based on this quick assessment, I decided to try to shoot Joe with just a single beauty dish. I left the grid on my Norman beauty dish and started with just this single source. I'm still waiting to get a nice heavy duty boom stand for my strobes, so the beauty dish was on a straight light stand and angled as far down as I could get it. This meant that the dish wasn't in the same place as the original photo, but even so, it was making the eyes too dark so I added some fill light using an on-camera flash with the Ray ring flash adapter set on a very low power setting (between 1/64 and 1/128).
After a dozen shots or so, I ended up with the shot above, which was close to the original pose and yet not forced by Joe.

If I was to shoot this again, I could get closer to the original by using a boom light stand for the beauty dish and removing the grid for more specular highlights. I would also add a small light source from behind to really catch some of the smoke coming from the cigarette. Looking at the original, it's possible that there was another light directly behind Lynch on his left pointed straight up to catch the smoke and possibly a little of his hair. Even a speedlite at low power would be enough to really highlight the smoke in the air.

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out as I was able to deconstruct the original photo and get something close to it and yet original without any kind of trial run.

Joe continues to work on his latest short film The Lonely Sound.