Copying Karsh

As anyone who knows me will know, I am a great fan of the Yousuf Karsh, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century and his work has really inspired me over the last few years.

Generally, I don’t try to copy other photographers work directly but I thought it would be interesting to see how closely I could get an image to one of Karsh’s and because I was wearing a roll neck at the time and had a bit of a beard, I thought I would try recreate one of his images of Ernest Hemmingway.

The first thing was to try and get the lighting right and that took a bit of time. I did take a quick look at one of my Karsh books to see the original image and then getting the lighting similar but I didn’t take the book into the shoot, so I would have to use my mind a bit to get the set up around right.

Now starting with the back light, it looks like Karsh is using two hair lights, one of each side. So I used my normal technique of having two gridded soft boxes. though I angled the soft boxes at a 45 degree angle , so I could get the more light on my hair. Where to position the light, I used the shadow on the nose, to work out the height of the light and the lights position.

With the main light, I used a set of barn doors, which allowed me to control where the lighting went more. I knew that Karsh didn’t use a diffused light because you can see the light reflection in the eyes of Ernest Hemmingway.

Editing

As normal, I edited in Capture One Pro doing all the basic edit and then doing the finishing touches in Photoshop. Now I won’t go into details about the editing but because the image started off as a colour digital image, it was very different to Karsh’s black and white film image.

Conclusion.
In the end I think I got the image pretty close, in fact so close that quite unexpectedly, I won the Master Photographer Association Qualified Silver for December, which was rather unexpected.

The good thing with effectively, copying someone else’s work is you can learn something new from it. Now, I didn’t know Karsh’s lighting for the shot and had to work it out and this made me think about the shot more. It is important to acknowledge the photographers who came before and to learn from them.

A short follow up. Due to Covid-19, I spent most of last year closed, so I haven’t been able to shoot anyone else. This has meant that I have spent more time entering selfie photos into the monthly critique. This was the case for Decembers critique, so at the last minute, I thought I would put this image in.

Now my only hope was that I would be that Ray Lowe, who is the judge and a font of knowledge about photography would associate my photo with Karsh’s photo. It worked but a little more than I had expected and I won the silver award for this months MPA Qualified Portrait critique.