"Lumography: Portrait & Light" is inspired by one of my favorite photographers, Jeremy Cowart . For this porject, I decided to emulate his portrait style. Portraits are my favorite things to photograph and I’ve had a lot of experience in portraiture, so I knew I wanted to do something that was different that what I have done before and would push my boundaries. Jeremy Cowart created the concept of a “Lightograph,” and the images I produced for my final project were inspired by this style in which he shoots. Jeremy’s lighting setup is highly expansive, with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and he shoots these kinds of portraits in burst mode while strobes and flashes are firing every half second.

I built a rudimentary version of his setup. I used a flash remote and programmed a combination of three strobes and five speed lights to one of four channels on my camera remote. As I shot each photo, I switched back and forth between channels so that specific lights would fire at certain times. I also used an HD projector as a backdrop, where the images and textures changed every second. I even had the subject step into the projector images for some of the shots, which bathed them in beautiful light and textures. The projector images used in my portraits are licensed as Creative Commons imagery from Unsplash. With better planning, it would have been awesome to photograph my own images to use as background textures for this project. The process was one of the most chaotic and random photography processes I have ever attempted. Though random, It was a process that took hours of planning and setup. It was a lot of work, but I loved the results. 

I found 19 people who were willing to have their portraits taken in this style and photographed them all in my makeshift “studio.” In the end, I made Lightograph GIFs similar to Jeremy Cowart’s work where the subject remains frozen, but the light changes within the frame around the subject.