Synth-Pop Nostalgia: Mördelin Press Kit
When musician Pascal Carton approached me, he wanted to get a series of images to promote his new venture as a solo artist - Mördelin. Whilst he didn't have an exacting idea of how the images should look he wanted a vibe to match his creative style and the retro look of Synth-Pop - I instantly thought of futuristic yet nostalgic 80‘s neon with a little mix of blade runner, that cool blue haze with little pops of warmth to highlight and accentuate lines and shape.
I'd used colour gels in my work before very occasionally by implementing a half strength CTO (colour temperature orange) on a beauty dish for backlighting - it provides a warm separation that feels like evening sunlight and can look quite cinematic if the lens flares a little. After testing in the studio I determined there were two ways to get the look I had envisioned for the shoot:
Use both a full CTO & full CTB (colour temperature blue) on lights setup in contrast to each other as broad and short, then shoot with little or no ambient/white light in the room.
Use a tungsten white balance to shift all ambient white light into the blue spectrum, this method would also push a full CTO into the white spectrum meaning I'd need to stack multiple gels onto one light to achieve a warm colour, one gel would just return the colour balance back to being neutral.
I ended up using the first method whilst in studio as it was easier to control the intensity of the blue colour, combined with a cheap smoke machine the colours hit the notes I wanted and added a little atmosphere so the shot didn't look so clean.
A few days before the shoot I’d scouted a location in Manchester where I wanted to create the lead image in the series, the base of three new skyscrapers that were nearing the end of construction. I chose this spot due to the buildings being uninhabited, they wouldn't have any interior lights which would look quite ominous as a backdrop for our musical hero to stand in-front of.
The hero shot was taken on a phase one IQ1 50 with a 55mm Schneider Kreuznach lens around an hour before sunset in December, I had pascal stand on a platform 1m off the ground so I could shoot from a low angle and make him appear strong and powerful. The main light is an Elinchrom 135cm Octa camera right, gelled with a half CTO so I could retain some natural skin tone, there's a second light camera left just out of frame, a bare flash, with 2 stacked CTO's for a warm backlight. White balance was set to tungsten to shift all of the ambient light into the blue spectrum.
Here's the image as it was out of camera next to the finished version after colour grading & retouching. I ended up shifting the white balance on Pascal to be a little warmer, to my eyes the cold colour on the skin tones didn't feel quite right and by shifting them warmer the focus is back onto him as the hero of the image. In hindsight I should have used a full stop CTO for the main light but having the flexibility to shift the balance in just one area of the image meant it wasn’t a big deal.
