In 2019 Qatar won their first-ever AFC Asian Cup title with a 3-1 victory over four-time, sixteen-year reigning champion, Japan. It was an exciting and dramatic tournament, but for more than what many football fans outside of the region may have realized. Two years earlier, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed a blockade on Qatar, severing diplomatic relations and banning Qatar-registered planes and ships from utilizing their airspace, sea routes, or land border crossings. Qatar rejected the blockade demands of its neighbors, and as the embargo persisted, relationships in the region continued to sour.   

 

You can imagine then, how much pride was on the line during the first major  football tournament between the conflicting countries. The buildup to the AFC Cup was ripe with blockade tensions, particularly between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Qatari fans, organizers, even the AFC Vice-President were barred by the Emiratis from entering the UAE, even though the final match was held at Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi. When Qatar came out on top, the country erupted into a week long celebration, with one of the most epic homecoming parades I’ve ever seen. 

The world went a little crazy this past Spring. Within the span of a few weeks we went from openly joking about Coronavirus and toilet paper shortages, to serious nationwide lockdowns, closed borders, and mandatory quarantines. The only silver lining in the early days of the pandemic was that short term flat rentals were practically free. I weighed my options and decided to stay put in central London over the summer to wait out the worst of it.  

I hunkered down in the West End behind the big screen in Picadilly Circus and for the most part just grew a beard and wore the same pajamas every day. It wasn’t the most exciting time but it was a great opportunity to capture some incredibly surreal shots of the city in lockdown. It was like wandering around in a zombie apocalypse, seeing some of the most popular hotspots like Regent Street, China Town, and the London Eye completely devoid of the usual excitement and tourist activity.   

Lately I’ve been in love with old Renaissance and Dutch Master portraits. There’s something about that surreal style, soft lighting, random animals, and longing stares into the distance that I needed to try for myself. I wasn’t really sure where to begin until I got a small battery-powered light wand for Christmas. 

My brother (pictured below) and I started playing around on Christmas morning, brainstorming in the dining room with a dark sheet clamped to a shelf on the wall for a backdrop. We started pulling ornaments off the Christmas tree, garland from the kitchen, a blanket from the couch, and BAM. In 10 minutes we had travelled back 400 years.

It cracked us up. Seriously, we could not stop laughing at the ridiculousness of it. As hodgepodge as it was, it worked. We started adding anything else we could find around the house, from babies and pets to candles and parents:

Edit gallery

For the grand finale, I wanted to take a stab at recreating the Last Supper during a Friendsgiving potluck at my brother’s house a few days later. I think this one turned out to be one of my all-time favorite pictures, and one that the baby (my niece) will definitely get a laugh out of when she’s older. I call it First Supper.

Lighting Setup and Post Processing

I had a hard time finding good resources on how to recreate this look through a photograph, so I’m going to share my secrets here for anyone that would like to try something similar. It was really a lot of fun and I encourage anyone with a camera (even a smartphone) and access to some kind of light source (even a lamp) to try this out.

For each shot above, I had the light wand off to the side in a way that only illuminated the subjects partially. The shadows you make here are the key to the effect. If you take a look at any of those pictures, you’ll notice that each face has some dramatic lighting that includes both light and shadow. It takes a bit of trial and error moving the light source around to get the best shadow balance, depending on a person’s facial features and how they’re situated. I had everyone angled a bit to their right in order to get a face shadow that I liked.

The next big tip is to underexpose these bad boys. Make sure they come out dark. This is a great time to practice shooting in manual mode for anyone uncomfortable with it. Shooting in other auto or semi-auto modes will allow your camera to overcompensate for the lack of light and you’ll end up with a well-exposed shot that just won’t look right with the effect you’re trying to achieve. I tried to get each shot dark enough that I could barely see any details at all in the background, and light on the face was the main focal point.

In Photoshop, I played around with a few different techniques. I always start off dodging and burning. There’s 1000 ways to do this, but I prefer using 2 curve adjustment layers, one for adding light and one for taking it away. Since these were underexposed straight out of the camera, I did more work on the dodging layer to bring out details in the face and clothing. I like color grading based on luminosity so I use color balance adjustment layers with ‘apply image’ on their masks to target shadows and highlights separately. There’s no rule book for color grading since it really comes down to personal style and preference, but for the shots above, I tended to add yellow and red to the shadows and highlights to give them a warm feel. I also played around with some different textures using open source pictures of concrete from Unsplash. I tried out the ‘oil paint’ filter in CC 2019 but ended up going with a different brush from the filter gallery.

The Sultanate of Oman is a Middle Eastern country on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It borders the United Arab Emirates in the northwest, Saudi Arabia in the west, and Yemen in the southwest. It’s a beautiful country with a diverse landscape and a culturally rich heritage dating back over 106,000 years. It is the oldest independent state in the Arab world, under rule by the Al-Said family since 1744, but has only recently opened up for tourism in the late 1980s.

I took a trip there to visit my friend Abdullah, who was kind enough to act as my unofficial tour guide this trip. We traveled a couple hours south of Muscat to his hometown village in Tiwi. From there we camped out on the mountainside, hiked and swam through Wadi Tiwi,  and played some football with his local club on the coast.