r/AskPhotography • u/CertainAstronomer479 • 1d ago
Editing/Post Processing What technique was used to make/edit this picture ?
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u/BewbyBewbs 1d ago
A side light, probably with a gel or could also be a tungsten bulb. In post production - highlights lifted and shadows down, yellow also probably boosted. And then in affinity photo/photoshop, a texture file (paper textures are quite common) overlayed on top of the image with blend mode set to negation.
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u/SCphotog 16h ago edited 16h ago
I poked around a little and found some images that appear to be from the same shoot/day... these other images strongly 'suggest' that the haze might be from actual smoke from a real fire... with whatever unknown editing in post. He set shit on fire pretty often... which can be seen in his body of work from around the mid 2000's, not just from this shoot but several others.
It's anyone's guess as to how the editing was actually done. It looks like darkroom-chemical work to me, but there's no way anyone could be sure without finding documentation or asking McGinley himself.
The small bit of information I was able to dig up indicates that McGinley was likely working with 35mm film during that time of his career. (See the interview link I'll drop at the bottom)
Anything else is just guesswork. Despite people's propensity to say 'with confidence' how they think it was done...no one really knows.
Starting with a smoky, steamy, hazy image and then working in digital, there are probably dozens of ways to get a similar output. Depends on the starting image and then whatever of the other multitudes of potential softwares the photographer/editor might employ.
If I needed to try to reproduce this I'd see what I could get using a commercial smoke machine first. then...grain, soft-focus, HSL - pushing everything to black and yellow-ish, fuck around with contrast. It would require 'fiddlin' around. A similar result should be reasonably achievable without having to walk into a brush fire. Probably also of note is the diffused ambient - even at night the sky matters. These were made somewhere out in the English countryside with a broad sky in the background. How much that matters is unknown, but it 'does' matter.
https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/kate-moss-dreamgirl
https://www.workhousecollective.com/notes/kate-moss-by-ryan-mcginley
https://aaronschuman.com/mcginleyinterview.html
https://americansuburbx.com/2012/10/interview-ryan-mcginley-2007.html
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u/CertainAstronomer479 14h ago
I really appreciate your response. Thank you
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u/SCphotog 14h ago
No problem. It was an interesting little dive into McGinley's work. Interesting to find out that he's a skateboarder. That's my own background - and I found a bit of connection to him and his work.
Good stuff.
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u/Ok-Yak-1552 21h ago
Who’s the photographer? I’d like to see more of his work
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u/CertainAstronomer479 21h ago
The model is Kate Moss, and a google search suggests that it’s Ryan McGinley (and apparently someone asked the same question as me before lol)
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u/weeddealerrenamon 1d ago
OP, you're not going to like this... but first you need a jar,