I remember taking this picture to test out how the dark blue gel would look on camera.
More recently when I came back to review this from a fresh perspective, it reminded me of Dorothea Lange's iconic shot of the migrant woman with her child.
I cropped up the image and started having a play. At first I was thinking, why not take some inspiration from Andy Worhol and play around with pop colours. Here are some outcomes from some playful edits in Adobe Lightroom.
Mona Lisa, that image popped into my head, Elina’s expression is almost a replica. Only if she had been turned a little more to her right and her hand gently resting over her other. However, as a viewer you could be standing at different angles and perceive her to be looking at you!
Unfortunately, I was not going to get much natural colour out of this image to attempt to replicate the famous painting so back to Dorothea Lange’s portrait.
Original Image using Blue Gel and Nikon D800
‘Pop Look’
Lange’s original image was black and white, so naturally I decided to start playing around with different black and white filters on Adobe Lightroom. Here are the results from that test. With the blue filter in place the image was much brighter but far too contrasty in comparison to Lange’s work.
After a slight exposure adjustment and dehazing of the image I came to this outcome. I like the sharp contrasting metallic look and feel of the image. I didn’t do any retouching of the image keeping in mind Lange’s iconic authentic capture.
After benching the image for a while, I came to look at it from a fresh perspective. Looking back at early 18th century cyanotypes, I wondered if I could recreate the same look with this image due to the strong overcast of blue from the gel.
‘Cyanotype Look’
‘Wet Plate Collodion Look’
To get this cyanotype lookalike I increased the exposure, shadows while reducing the highlights and whites from the image. A little bit of dehazing and some reduction in saturation led to this outcome which was quite pleasing.
Wet plate collodion photography is fascinating to watch being done right in front of you. Thanks to the digital era one doesn’t need to spend too much time getting all the materials required to recreate an attempted look in Lightroom.
Final Image edited in Adobe Lightroom 2022
To create this image I flipped the image in to black and white and for good measure added in some fine grain.
All these images were shot on a Nikon D800, 85mm f/1.4 lens. The ISO was set to 100, aperture to f/4.0 and shutter speed 1/100sec.
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