I recently found a book with a collection of black and white stills of hollywood movie stars shot by Mr. George Hurrel. I've found similar books featuring photographers such as Len Prince in "About Glamour" and others who have a similar style of photography.

I have also tried studying their style by looking at the photos to determine how they have used lighting, angles, etc.

My question is Do you have any knowledge about this style of photgraphy? Do you have any tips in re-creating the photo style? Do you have any suggestions where I might get more in-depth information regarding these photographers?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,

Christian J. Carlander

-- Chris J. Carlander (chriscarlander@yahoo.com), August 04, 1999

Answers

I love the old-style Hollywood glamour photography too. Here's a website dedicated to Hurrell (mostly to sell prints and videos, but surely worth a look):

http://www.hurrellphotography.com/

While I've never personally taken a whack at it, similar results can definitely be achieved today with modern equipment. But maybe going old-tech is really the way to do it. Hurrell (and Clarence Bull, and the other old-school glamour photographers) used large-format cameras (probably 8x10, but I'm sure they occasionally slummed with 4x5!), slow b/w film (hey, in the thirties and forties, ASA 64 was considered REALLY fast!), and hard lights - typically motion picture keylights and spotlights. Hurrell's pics usually have one hard key light, and sometimes softer fill/reflected light, and often a hairlight. He often used gobos and barndoors to get hard lines of light/dark in the background settings (and of course, the old venetian blind effect).

And two other things - his subjects were typically wearing tons of serious makeup applied by expert Hollywood pros, and his negatives were massively retouched (one of the key reasons for using a big negative) to assist the makeup in producing impossibly smooth and bleamish-free skin textures. They don't call this kind of photography "transforming mere human beings into beautiful gods and goddesses" for nothing!

Hopefully, others who have actually done photos in this style will give you some more concrete advice. Good luck, and have fun going for that old Hollywood look (try telling your models to imagine themselves as wide-eyed starlets who just won contracts with a major studio!)...

-- Michael Goldfarb (mgoldfar@mobius-inc.com), August 04, 1999.

Hurrel did use an 8x10 for almost all his work. There is an excellent article on his techniques in "View Camera" about a year ago. He also use difusion lenses, notable the Wollensak Verito. These lenses had more difusion with the larger f-stops, so Hurrel went with the smaller openings and hense had to deal with very powerful lights, like 750-1000 watts. Wonderful pics that while they looked dated, still have tremendous emotional power.

-- chuck k (kleesattel@webtv.com), August 04, 1999.

In that View camera article the author discussed Hurrel's "mammary laterns"...a homemade soft-box style diffuser that Hurrel used for his key....chimera builds a lantern modifier like this and was described by the author of the article as giving off a kinda "moon-glow" light....this may help you...I think, like the others here, that the use of classic materials may help to reproduce the look of Hurrel...pay careful attention to the photos that you like...look at the catchlights and highlights carefully to debug the lighting scheme.

-- trib (linhof6@hotmail.com), August 06, 1999.