public places project

last week photographer Harry Wilcken posted some photos out of his last shoot with model Lindsey Duinmayer in Streetfashion MagZZine's Facebook group. We have seen the photos and immediately decided to show you some more photos as well as some background of this session.

For Harry Wilcken this session is a part of his project of street portrait photography, he is working on since summer 2016. The goal of these sessions is to put the models in emblematic / most visited / well-known places of the city and make some portraits. Sometimes Harry works with a Make up artist, but he likes the models to be who they are, wearing their own clothes doing their make up and hair, and posing natural.

Model Lindsey Duinmayer  according to Harry is a young, beautiful, funny, extroverted and easy-going person, even she doesn’t like to smile very often.  A really good model to work with, nice long legs & sexy look.

Harry is processing almost the same way for each and every model he works with:

• Contact / invitation to be a part of the project
• Send a copy of the contract
• Ask for some photos of the outfits they want to wear for the session
• Scouting (Harry goes to the city to see the actual situation of the streets to check for construction works or events in planning)
• Selection of date, usually on a Saturday
• With all the above information, Harry makes a plan and a route for the session.

They use 4, 5 and sometimes 6 locations and the model changes outfits constantly.

As mentioned above, Harry chooses 4 to 6 different locations (close to each other). He tries to use places people visit the most, places full of history and /or with architectural interest. Old and new, no distictions.

For the project Harry uses a Nikon D-810, one prime lens Nikon 85mm 1.8 (back-up camera = Nikon D-300 with a 50mm 1.4 lens) and works with available light plus two off–camera flash units (Nikon) on tripods. As light modifiers he uses 40x40 cm softbox, snoot, grid.

For the camera settings Harry mostly reads the ambient light of the background and add extra light to the model without TTL. Color chart check every time possible.
Harry knows well how his camera catches skin tones and what chromatic aberration the lens he uses has, so he doesn’t spend so much time making readings for “a perfect” white balance.

For the post processing Harry tries to avoid editing the images. Lens correction and white balances are mandatory. A small correction to highlights and shadows when necessary. For the rest, he leave the images as they were taken.