Creating a Vintage Pin-up Style Art Nude Photo - Video

[Martin Vronsky]

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In today's Photo Deconstruction, I'm going to show you how I created an art nude image inspired by vintage pinup.  

People often ask me what inspires me. The short answer is everything! I really love getting inspiration from paintings or old Hollywood and even pinup photography. I often tie these elements into my own work in some capacity or another. 

The image shown here today was taken at my Fine Art Nude photography workshop (https://lindsayadler.photo/fan-workshop)

The concept for this image was to create something with a vintage feel. I wanted it to feel timeless, pin-up like and of course have a modern twist! 

When photographing fine art nudes the focus is typically all about the model and the human form. While I have many different exciting and creative setups at my workshops, this one was meant to be more simplistic and elegant. It also helps when your model has that pinup girl look! 

Lighting:

For the shot, I end up using four different strobes.  

I began by lighting the background which was Savage Universal Seamless Coral with two strobes on either side. 

The main light I chose my go-to modifier which is the Westcott Optical Spot. Using this modifier I was able to control exactly what part of the body would be illuminated. 

Since the main light focused on one area the rest of her body fell into dark shadow, so to fix that, I introduced a medium umbrella with diffusion on the right to fill in those shadows. 

Post Processing

This is where we ended up with the shot: 4:25

Now, some of the things that I'm analyzing that I don't like in this shot, I definitely don't 
like the highlight that I see on the background that is from the optical spot spilling on to it. I could have changed the angle of the optical spot, maybe move the subject further away, but I didn't so I knew that I'd have to fix that in post. 

I cleaned up a few other areas of the image, including some fraid hairs etc as well as desaturated everything a bit and warmed things up to try to emulate more of a vintage look. 

What I captured on camera is quite close, but we were able to achieve much more of that vintage look and that timeless vibe with my color grading and also the perfection of the retouching.