tomb_raider_series_01

Tomb Raider series: Lara Croft for the second time

Once again, Lara Croft in my version. The first photos with Lara (you can find a description of the photo session here) caused quite a stir – thanks to them, I started paying attention that someday I would be able to take good pictures and finally found the courage to arrange photo shoots with aspiring models. Some time has passed and I realized that I messed up the first shoot with Lara in many ways. A vision appeared to redo Tomb Raider once again, but only when I improved my skill level. It took me several months.

Meanwhile, a reboot of Tomb Raider was announced where Lara no longer looked like before:

They changed quite a bit in appearance, even Lara’s features were different. Additionally, she was dressed differently, covered in wounds and dirtied with her own blood. And since I really like blood, I immediately decided that there was no point in repeating the previous photo shoot but instead creating a new one in the same convention as the upcoming game. The main character remained unchanged – Klaudia Danch (Kala); as did the location of the photo session – ruins of a cement plant in Bedzin city in Poland. It was an excellent location but as I mentioned during the previous Lara photos, it is no longer legally accessible. I had three speedlights (super cheap Yongnuo YN-460II) available which posed some difficulties because I had plans to use more lamps. I tried to salvage things with flash reflection by bouncing light off surfaces but let’s go over it step by step…

Lara Croft: Preparations

I had the guns and holsters from last year, and Klaudia took clothes from home. First, makeup artist Karolina Zientek prepared Klaudia for the role of Lara for 6 hours. She made a big wound on her forehead and a few smaller ones on her face and body. She also did make-up, hairstyle, wrapped her in bandages, added quite a lot of blood and made people look at Klaudia with horror as she walked through the market to the nearby parked car (someone even asked if she needs help).

After an hour we arrived at our location; unpacking equipment also took some time. Mateusz “Pro” Prociak, my assistant helped me so it was going pretty smoothly. We were shooting in ruins area so I brought foldable chairs and mats that could be spread on the ground to throw clothes together with other items (mats bought at Tesco shop for pennies – they work great). I also brought along my usual five-liter water canisters – they came in handy to create mud which Kala was covered with as well as weighing down tripods. On site Karolina finished up with make-up preparation and we started taking pictures. The main problem was time because it turned out that we had to finish no later than 5 P.M; which meant we had less than four hours for shoot and packing up all gear before leaving. At first just quick portrait shot then some playtime where Kala gets dirty playing around mud mentioned earlier.

Fun fact: In the town of Dukinfeld near Manchester, police officers used a battering ram to break down the door of a house and aimed at a figure inside who was holding two pistols. The officers had noticed the figure through a window and intervened. It turned out that this “figure” was actually a 1:1 scale Lara Croft statue. The statue was confiscated as evidence, and its owner spent 13 hours in custody on charges related to firearms threats.

Lightning

The ceiling was very high and the walls were far apart. I only had Youngnuo YN460-II speedlight with transparent umbrellas and a sun reflectors set (not very useful, but I remember we used one), which I once described as a “$200 set”. I didn’t have electricity for studio lamps, and the beauty dish needed too much light (and it wouldn’t be enough anyway) – photos would have to be taken at very low apertures with high ISOs for them to make any sense with speedlights. Then the sun light would already interfere, which wasn’t planned for, so the beauty dish remained at home. Thanks to the fact that the walls and ceiling were so far away, it was possible to separate main lighting from other lamps (normally a transparent umbrella “hits” everything around it and light reflects off of anything; here fortunately there was nothing). In any case, I managed to create an atmosphere using just lighting – it was dark with plenty of shadows according to plan. I only used Photoshop for necessary corrections as this is what I prefer.

We started with a portrait shot made mainly with the makeup artist’s portfolio in mind (this time more like a character designer):

Nikon D700 | Nikkor 135mm 2D DC | F/5,6, 1/200, ISO 200

In short, I messed it up. There should have been a separate lamp for the background and two rim lights instead of one. Unfortunately, it was done in a hurry to start shooting final photos as soon as possible. At that time, I thought it was okay. The setup is so simple that there’s no sense in showing a diagram – the main light from behind an umbrella, slightly to the right (look at the shadow under nose) and rim light visible on hair and neck.

The second shot was the most important one. It was inspired by one of the game promotional wallpapers. Here’s how it turned out:

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Nikon D700 | Nikkor 135mm 2D DC | F/5,6, 1/200 ISO 320

In this case, the photo was planned in advance and I knew exactly how it should look. There were no major problems, so we focused on details such as how to hold the knife, how the bandage should hang, how to position the hand and other things that are very important to me. The setup was just as simple as before – main light from behind a transparent umbrella and a bare fill light illuminating areas that would have been too dark without it. ISO increased to 320 because there wasn’t enough power in the main lamp.

You also have a comparison: before using Photoshop and after. First of all, I removed the “stairs” on the left side (fortunately they are not present in other photos), corrected the skin tone, mud on the shoe and some details so that everything would be okay in full resolution as well.

Another photo with similar main light, but without rim light. Instead, the second lamp was moved to a different location and set up to very delicately illuminate the part of the wall above the head; without this, the hair would merge too much with the background. I switched from a 135mm lens to a 50mm lens. The resulting photo looks like this:

Nikon D700 | Sigma 50mm 1,4 EX DG HSM | F/5,6, 1/200s, ISO 400

ISO was increased for the same reason as before – the lamp wasn’t able to handle it. It was meant to be dark, so I didn’t light up faces with additional light. I like strongly shaded places, which can be seen in my other photo sessions. With the next photo, I set up the lamps in exactly the same way, only this time you can see more of the wall in the background and it’s slightly more lit up:

Nikon D700 | Sigma 50mm 1,4 EX DG HSM | F/5,6, 1/200s, ISO 320

On the next photo I used a lot of Photoshop because the motion blur effect was added in post-processing. My zoom lens wasn’t working, so I didn’t even try to achieve such an effect before editing, because I couldn’t. I inserted the logo from an earlier version of the game than intended. Oh well, I won’t change it now – let it be this way.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Nikon D700 | Sigma 50mm 1,4 EX DG HSM | F/5,6, 1/200s, ISO 320

Bonus: the photo below was based on our previous photo session. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but I decided to post it on the blog anyway:

One more photo from the photo session that I earmarked for deletion, but let it stay on the blog:

Summary

While transparent umbrellas in indoor settings have always annoyed me, this time the walls and ceiling were far enough away that I could fully control them. I tried not to get too close to the model with them so that the shadows wouldn’t be too soft. However, this meant that at f/5.6 and with lights placed far from the character, there wasn’t enough power. As a result, I had to raise the ISO multiple times. Like my previous photo session with Lara, I could’ve used available light instead of creating everything from scratch with flashes but decided that it would ruin the atmosphere by filling in shadows. Therefore, from start to finish everything was shot at 1/200 s and I’d do it again next time as well. Overall, I was very pleased with the shots despite not having enough time for more frames (the initial plan called for even 15), but shooting such a quantity in one location could become tedious anyway. In any case, I remember this session very fondly. The post-processing was also enjoyable – no worrying about skin or details like beauty shots require :).

BTW

The creators of Tomb Raider mentioned my photos on the official website (as you can see, my brand Thomas Voland did not exist back then):

Tomb Raider

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