Sunday 27 July – went to photograph world renowned flamenco guitarist Juan Martin.
Juan Martin is reckoned to be one of the foremost flamenco guitarists in the world so as part of my personal mission to document flamenco I arranged to meet up with him whilst he was in London.
He was actually teaching a Masterclass on behalf of the International Guitar Federation at KIng’s Place near St Pancras. A group of a dozen guitar aficionados had gathered to worship at his feet and learn just how it should be done.
Flamenco is normally considered to be the fusion of three arts:
Dance – Baile
Song – Cante
Guitar – Guitarra
Surprisingly, for some people the guitar is the lesser of the flamenco arts and it is the song and dance that holds the emotion.
I don’t know enough about it to express an opinion but was quickly aware that I was in the presence of someone who can make a guitar sing.
You will notice in the pictures the length of the nails on his right hand, especially his thumb.
They are very important to a flamenco guitarist and are jealously maintained.”So what do you do if you break one ?”
“Superglue !”
Update: Some keen photo-folk want to know the equipment I used on this shoot so I have added a little addendum at the bottom of this blog.
Check out his video on YouTube where Juan describes the art of flamenco guitar far better than I can.
Link Here
All pix shot on the Nikon D800 (which is my most favourite camera ever) using either the old Nikon 85mm f1.8 (had it for 20+ years) or the Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 zoom.
Lighting was supplied by my Godox battery flash units, which I reviewed at the end of last year – they worked really well.
Set at 1/16th power I was getting F7.1 at 200asa
Using a smallish beauty dish (similar to this one) and a honeycomb ( like this ) as the main light source quite close to the subject (about 1m – 1.5m).
At this range the fall-off of light was quite severe which is what I wanted and enabled me to keep much of the subject in shadow.
(I had a softbox too, but found that it was much harder to control the light spill.)
For fill light I had a single Lastolite reflector on a stand
I also used another head to add some light from behind and lift his dark hair from the black background. This head was also used with a small reflector dish and a honeycomb grid to control the spill.
Any questions – just drop me a line and I’ll get back to you asap.