The Mona Rachel

The Renaissance was a cultural movement in Europe starting in the 14th century and ended roughly in the 17th century, it was the kick starter for most of today's academic studies as well. These include art, science, literature and an assortment of others. Some of the most influential scientists, writters and artist's lived in this time period. Galileo (a famous astronomer), William Shakespeare (a famous play writer) and Leonardo Da Vinci, the painter of the Mona Lisa, which was the painting subject for this assignment.

The Mona Lisa was an oil painting on a poplar canvas by Leonardo Da Vinci and was a self portrait of Leonardo himself, and took him more than 16 years to complete (1503 - 1519). This was because he was know to start things but never finish them. It is one of the most popular paintings around the world and one the "most used" paintings by the Avant-garde society of art. It is currently on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and is priced at 100 million dollars.

For this assignment, I used 1:1 lighting with a shutter speed of 1/40 and an aperture of 4. I had Samantha's laptop right next to me with the Mona Lisa open so I could get Rachel to sit just right! It took me a while to get the lighting right because I wanted to use as little Photoshop as I could. The light on the right side of Rachel's face was very close (only about a meter away), while the second was just a fill light about 3 meters away to help lighten the shadows. I had taken several pictures before I decided to make Rachel have a very subtle smile, I did not notice that the Mona Lisa had a smile till that point and was glad I caught it. One last thing was once I got home I noticed that the eyes on the Mona Lisa are looking directly at the viewer! I could not fix this and had to have a "Mona-Rachel" looking to the left, but whatever, IT'S STILL BEAUTIFUL!

And yes, I procrastinated to post this till Sunday...

Mixed Lighting

For mixed lighting, I decided to half light the face with natural light coming in at a 45 degree angle from above, the devils pit seemed like a good area because of the second floor windows.  I thought that this would help create shadows under the eyebrows, nose and bottom lip without being too harsh. The first photo I took was just using the light on the left from the window in the devil's pit and a large piece of white paper on the right to get a very faint glow on the cheek.
For the second photo I attempted to use the flash as a secondary, artificial, source of light instead of the paper. It did not turn out well. I found that I could adjust the power of the flash and set it to 1/8 the standard power, It gave me this nice result of a slightly more powerful glow on the right cheek and gave a bit more " of a shine" to the hair. It also took me about 5 different shots because Sam kept look directly at the camera!