Self-portrait study
After Yousuf Karsh.
Humphrey Bogart
A Canadian icon, a real cigarette, and a studio that stank for days.
Yousuf Karsh is a Canadian icon. That was the whole reason for this one — and the subject is Humphrey Bogart, so there was smoke to deal with.
Hot lights, not strobe
Karsh didn’t use strobes. He used continuous light, and not LEDs, which didn’t exist yet: fluorescents, or hot lamps. I happened to have a few hot lamps from lighting self-tapes, bought secondhand back when LEDs were new and expensive. Lowel DPs.
Hot lamps don’t give you much to work with. You change the power by moving them closer or further away, and you can focus them a little, moving the bulb in or out to make the light hotter.
Three lamps
Two were up high. One lit the whole side of my face: focused all the way and quite close, the hottest light in the set. The other gave me the kick on my right temple, but it was spilling everywhere, and in the original that area is all dark, so I flagged it with a piece of cardboard. I set the flag in close, the way I would with a strobe, and it started to smoke. They’re called hot lamps for a reason.
The front light was a bigger DP, quite far back, with its barn doors closed down almost to a snoot. It was only there to catch one part of my face and put the catchlight in the eye without spilling onto the rest, and it needed a flag as well.
Shooting it alone
The camera was low, and I had a mirror set up so I could see what the light was doing as I adjusted. Getting that kick up onto the temple took some odd positions with my chin.
I usually hold the remote trigger for these, but both hands were busy with the cigarette, and a timer would have been impossible. So it went on the floor, and I pressed it with my foot for every frame.
The cigarette
Real, and my first pack since high school. The studio STUNK after this shoot, and my mouth tasted like an ashtray.