Alexander Babic - Bonneville - how is it done

[softlight2111]

Hello all,
after only reading tons of threads on this phenomenal forum, I´ve got a question myself regarding the pictures of Alexander Babic taken at the Bonneville speedweek.
I know he takes the pictures with a Hasselblad H3d 31 and uses additional portable flash, that you can see as reflection in some of the portraited eyes.
How does he realize this clean, almost monochrome look? Of course the flash adds the punch in the lighting, but the colors look so nicely washed out and get this overall white blueish look.
Any help is appreciated in demystifying his look.

Here are the links.
His Flickr site
http://www.flickr.com/photos/interna...th/4614790337/

and his website
http://www.alexanderbabic.com/index.php?category=3

Please also check out the portrait series on his website, especially the portraits of the guys in front of the black cotton backdrop.

Thanks
Joe

[MacBurg]

The portraits in that series are all composites, although I suspect they were all shot on location using a portable studio setup. Then he has shot lots of background plates in either early morning or evening light, these shots have very low saturation to begin with other than the blues of the sky. Due to the haloing evident in a lot of pics he is then using high pass sharpening, or some form of it.

The portraits work well colourwise due to the complimentary colours of cyan/yellow of the sky/skintones. Good control with the use of lighting means you can expose well for colours and capture a lot of detail to work with from the start. This is made possible even easier in this series by being surrounded by a lake of white salt, and shooting on a grey background, so no colour casts to deal with.

[softlight2111]

hi shaun,
thanks for the reply. I doubt it completely, that the speedweek portraits are composites, cause if you look at the original images on his website, you can clearly see the exifs through exif viewer on firefox.

[MacBurg]

Exif is nothing to go by, it could be the exif from the background plate. Go to his website and in the series, have a good look at a lot of the vehicle shots, and the motorbike shots. See how the edges of the vehicles directly reflect what is behind them? They all have a very white reflection on the edges, this is a basic principle of angle of reflection. Now look at the portraits, some are even wearing shiny leather, and yet there's no reflection of the immediate background behind the person on any of the clothing. A lot of these portrait images have mixed Exif data to, f11-f32, which doesn't make sense considering the consistency of the lighting on the people, and would further show they are the exif data for the background images.


I don't mind this at all, just my observation, the images look great and have a lovely tone and colouring to them, super nice lighting setup whether they used the sun or imitated it as a highlight, everything is very well finished, except for the haloing.