Week 7 of Don Giannatti’s 8 Week Portrait Class brings us to Dan Winters – and wow!, time is certainly flying…

New to this series of posts? Catch up on the previous weeks using the following links:

Week 1: Victor Skrebneski

Week 2: Yousuf Karsh

Week 3: Sarah Moon

Week 4: Peter Lindbergh

Week 5: Herb Ritts

Week 6: Jeanloup Sieff

Every task list has an item in it that feels different to all the others – it doesn’t matter if it’s harder or easier, you just can’t wait to get to it. For us, Dan Winters is that item in this list of amazing photographers.

Week 7: Dan Winters

There is an unmistakable, deceptively simple style to Dan Winters’ photographs: once you’ve spent some time studying his work, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll never fail to recognize it again. His personality and life path shines through in his images: being a tinkerer and story teller at heart, he’ll often build studio sets for his subjects, either re-telling their stories or just creating new fantasies that live within each photograph.

Technically, Winters is a master of light, using it to create dimension and interest in his portraits. Flags are a key part to achieving his look, and most of his male portraits are taken with a sharp shadow across the side of the face allowing us to focus on the eye and the centre of the face.

Colour-wise, most of his known works show de-saturated, slightly grunge-y looks for men, and a lighter and airier feel for women, using a light green or turquoise colour as his background.

But independently of set or background, each of his portraits is overflowing with the subject’s personality, even if the subject is not interacting with the camera at the time. With simple changes of camera angles and subject position and expression, Winters is able to go from moody, to playful, to “commercially edgy”, without seemingly breaking a sweat: a true master of his art and craft.

Our Takeaways:

Here’s a list of what we set out to do, based on Winters’ images:

• To emulate his traditional lighting set up, and make it work on a female model, in a dark background.
• To explore lighter, more colorful backgrounds, changing the mood of the portrait, while keeping a similar lighting style.
• To capture a more commercial edgier image within the same setup as before.

And here are the results:

Lighting set – Dark background:

Using a fair share of flagged light sources and a bit of patience we managed to get close to the emblematic “Dan Winters look”. By capturing Iana not directly interacting with the camera, this portrait conveys a very personal, intimate feel.

Similar light, coloured background:

In this image we used a similar lighting setup, but changed the colour of the background to a more typical “Winters female portrait” inspired blue/green colour. The use of the prop and having Iana looking down keep the contemplative mood.

“Edgy Commercial”:

In our final image, we wanted to take what we had learnt of Dan Winters and make it our own, and to do this we went for a far more commercial, less intimate look – with an edge.  Changing the camera angle, with Iana looking far into the distance, allowed us to capture a far more statuesque – almost inaccessible – expression.

Coming up next week: William Coupon (last week!!)