Marcin Retecki FineArt Photography

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Here you can comment on my Week 12 self-portrait.

There isn’t much background story behind this week’s creation. You can read the info on project’s page if you like.

I know some of you would be interested in some sort of a tutorial on this kind of look. I didn’t plan one, but decided to write a few words exclusively for my readers.

Post Processing

1. My very first step for all non-street photos is to double the layer. I call it retouch and begin basic retouching. I rarely do anything fancy on this layer. Most likely I would remove annoying skin blemishes, a few loose hairs and lens/sensor dirt. If there was more to retouch, like compositing, I would work on separate layers for each element.
2. This is my usual step, I create a hue/saturation layer and set it to 0. Then I lower the opacity of this layer to taste. This time I used 30%. …

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This is a place to comment my Week 11 self-portrait.

First of all, I would like to thank Maciek Leśniak for inspiring me to make a back-scenes video from my photo-shoot. You should check out Maciek’s video here.

The making of:

Below you can see the room where I shot and the lighting set-up. …

A bit of history

The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century are incredibly dynamic times. The changes in artistic expression were faster than ever before. Basically, each new artistic era became shorter and shorter. Just look how long the Middle Ages were – roughly 10 centuries! There were different streams and distinctions, with two main “blocks” called Roman style and Gothic style. Each of them lasted hundreds of years.

Then the Renaissance, depending on the area, lasted roughly 300 years. Afterwards, each epoch got shorter and more diversified. Actually different movements overlapped each other, especially in different art areas. For example architectural Baroque lasted in Span till 18th century, when most of the Europe was already deeply in neoclassicism. In addition, Baroque in architecture didn’t mean that painters or writers were under the same influence, they often weren’t.

The 19th century was already a huge rush. It’s the era of romantics, realists, impressionists, symbolists. …

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This is a place to comment my Week 10 creation – The Evil Twin on the Back Seat…

Trivia

• It’s a composite of 3 images.
• I got the idea for the first time quite a while ago while watching Mr.Brooks.
• Mr.Brooks didn’t have a twin though…
• It was shot in a tight garage. I had problems walking round the car to set up the camera. I changed the perspective a few times so had squeeze there every time.
• The idea was that the twin appears to me only in the mirror, maybe it should be in the Mirrors Miniseries then?

As I said i used 3 different frames to make the final image. Below …

Before my recent discoveries, I would like to take a moment and show you two fill-up photos from my last week’s self-portrait session. The above one was a spoof on one of Jackie Chan’s movie covers, I can’t recall which one exactly. However, I added the mask for additional fun.

The set-up was exactly the same as in this one. The only difference is a slight yellow-green cast I added in post for the ninja pic. I still encourage you to express your opinion about the Week 9 – Are we really influenced by literally everything around us? I think the topic is interesting, although probably hard to express something new, give it a moment.

Influences are actually one of the most important factors which lead to developing our own style. …