One to One
Portrait photographer David Shoukry shoots for us in his home studio
Among many other things, 2020 will be remembered as the year that working from home became the norm rather than the exception for a lot of people. But many photographers didn’t need to make this transition – whether photographing people, pets or plants, they’d been successfully running operations at home for years. So when life locked down, they were fully prepared and able to carry on as much as normal under the circumstances.
David Shoukry is one such photographer – based in Wiltshire, he specialises in portraiture of people working in the performance arts, including actors, models and musicians. This latter category is particularly close to David’s heart, as he’s a music graduate and former music teacher who swapped one of his passions for another – the pianoforte made way for photography, something that he had previously enjoyed as one of his hobbies.
This progression is not an unusual one: music is all maths after all, and it’s impossible to have a technical conversation about photography without having to reference strings of numbers and fractions.
And while so much of our enjoyment of music is derived from the interplay of tone, tempo and volume, the same is true of photography, with various elements coming together to form a given image.
In terms of composition and how he builds his sets around his subjects, David’s work calls to mind classical portraiture – and this distinct style is completed by how he uses colour. Keen to see how David makes his portraits sing, we arranged a socially distanced shoot at his home studio, and invited Bristol-based models Sophie Shah and Curtly to come and strike some poses.
David had his studio converted from the garage adjacent to his house, then kitted it out to his own specifications. His setup is centred around a Fujifilm GFX 50S, tethered to an Apple iMac running Phase One’s Capture One software. Lighting is delivered via five Elinchrom BX250 RI flash heads,
diffused through Elinchrom Rotalux Octaboxes. State-of-the-art cameras and lighting are the tools that help create David’s work, but arguably the unsung hero of his setup is his bespoke backdrop installation.
“The backdrops hang from rails made from plumber’s copper tubing,” David explains. “The backdrops are made by Hand Painted Backdrops in Wigan, and they are exactly what the name suggests – made from artist’s canvas and hand-painted for an authentic look. I own about 20, to cover all the colour schemes, and use them in conjunction with old-fashioned changing screens or room divider screens. I like building up layers of texture with the backdrops and will use several at any one time – because you can emphasise certain backdrops in a shot, this gives a sense of depth to the photos.”
The sartorial brief for our models was to bring some outfits that looked modern but were also timeless. Discussing the first setup of the day, David suggested that Sophie wore a beige top and camel-coloured trousers.
“I’ll match all the sets and the lighting depending what the clothes are going to be, using traditional colour theory,” David says while hanging the backdrops to complement Sophie’s colour palette.
“For the lighting, I actually set the fill lights first, just to make sure that I’ve got a flat even light where everything looks like it’s properly exposed. I make all the exposure settings by eye, instead of using a flash meter, because I’m tethering, and it’s simply a case of ‘If the picture’s too bright, turn down the lights’ or ‘If the picture’s too dark, turn up the lights’. I’ll keep my camera settings more or less the same throughout the whole shoot; my usual settings are 1/125 sec at f/8, ISO 100.”
The final detail David adds is a fan to puff some extra volume into Sophie’s hair. Looking at the captures on-screen, this small addition makes a big impact, the feeling of movement injecting some added life to the images. And using a tethered setup certainly brings some advantages: the fast feedback of a high-res big-screen image means that David can get the shot he wants within several frames.
With that setup in the can, our next shot requires a change of backdrop and tweaks to the lighting – Sophie has donned an orange silky print dress. To complement the elegant feel of the garment, David swaps the simple wooden stool from the first shot for a Victorian two-seater sofa.
I’ll match all the sets and the lighting depending what the clothes are going to be, using colour theory