A link to Marc’s website – http://lagrange.be/ (beware, there are naked people on the other side of that link)
I really like Marc’s work. His tones, his processing, his framing and his overall aesthetic. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to pull up a few of his pictures and deconstruct them a bit, point out what I personally like about them and explore that a little.
This one is one of my favorites from his site. the tones are really great, and the coloring is spot on. I like the blue-purple of the walls, and the tungsten-ish orange of the chandelier up there. The lighting is mysterious and subtle… the model is well lit, but then the rest of the image has these encroaching shadows everywhere. This is obviously a built set, since no one would put a chandelier in the corner like that. There’s also something weird going on with the lens of the camera…. there’s a very shallow depth of field here, the lights up at the top are getting a little bit bokeh’d, which implies a long-ish lens, which wouldn’t be possible with this field of view. So something is happening there. It could be a bellows type camera, doing a bit of tilt-shift, or (and this is more likely) he could have his camera on a tripod, and he shot a frame of the top half of the picture by itself and then stitched the two together using photomerge or something similar. That could also explain the lighting a bit, since the model looks like there should be a light really close to her, but there isn’t.
Really nice tones and colors again. Notice that the contrast levels are a bit manipulated… the model has the most contrast in the image, even though that bottom right corner should technically be darker than she is. Again we have a pretty wide field of view to take in a lot of the scene. And again it feels like there should be a light source in there somewhere, but there isn’t one visible.
The best thing about this shot is that orange colored light on the wall at the top of the scene. I think it really makes the shot, since the rest of the image is very green and brown, that warm tight spot is picking out the detail there in such a cool way, creating a color twist for the image that might have been a little boring otherwise.
Really nice image here. Super shallow depth of field, a really big light source above and behind the camera (could be the open sky at sunset or a really large silk sheet diffusing the light), her skin is just drinking up the light and collecting these great big pools of reflection. A really beautiful image.
For me the towel makes this shot. It’s a clean graphic element, and it wraps around the subject and defines her form really well. Again we have a really large light source, in this case it looks like it’s mostly high up and camera right, sort of on the other side of the model’s face, which is giving us some nice shadow areas under her cheekbones and under her eyebrows. There’s a subtle color thing happening in the background, looks like a bit of green tinted yellow washing across the frame. Notice also that her face and hair have the greatest amount of contrast in the shot. Everything else has lower contrast compared to that.
So that’s it for me. Those are the big things that I notice in these images, and what they say to me. Doing these kinds of decontructions can be very educational, because you learn a bit more about yourself and what you like. These images are so subtle and sophisticated, the processing so beautiful and clean, I’m really in awe of them. But that’s just what I value, and what I like in a photo. What do you look for in an image?
Inspiring Photographer - Marc Lagrange
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