TOMAS WHITEHOUSE

My good friend Henrik and I were hired by Canon through event management team – Sisters Inc to shoot 20 portraits and process them in the style of Andy Warhol’s Che Guevara piece.
As part of the presentation, the final edits were then printed onto canvas by the state of the art Canon large format printers and given out as 30x30cm souvenirs.
The time allowance for this assignment, from shoot to canvas in hand, was less than two hours.

For those that know me well and have already poked and jeered at the fact that I’m primarily a Nikon shooter, we used all Canon equipment and no Nikons were harmed during our time at Canon HQ:

The tools for the job were a 5D MKII, an 85mm MKII and three 580EXII’s.

Lighting wise we had a boomed 580EXII with shoot through umbrella as a main light and another two 580EXII’s to light the white wall behind the subject, blowing it out for an easy extraction in photoshop.

There’s was no real need for a fill light as a very defined contrast between the highlights and shadows was needed to allow a better balance when applying the threshold filter in post.

With respect to our time limit, Henrik was the designated shooter of the 20 portraits and I looked after the post process and file export.

Henrik switched the 5D to kick out the smallest possible resolution as the images were destined for a severe de-res during the post application, these small file sizes were extremely quick to transfer, leaving us all the time we needed for a speedy turn around in shooting our 20 subjects with the time allowance.

Despite there being an array of photoshop actions for Warhol-esque effects, I found none that were up to standard, reliable or customisable. Instead, I developed my own workflow that combined manual masking and some more simplistic action based processes.

Youtube alternative.

Youtube alternative.

A huge thanks goes to Sisters Inc and the staff at Canon for such a wonderful experience.