Terry Richardson Style Tribute Photos {30 Photoshoot challenge #5}

Okay I'll say it, Tyler Shields is like Terry Richardson with Props. I've been wanting to do a exploitative photoshoot tribute for maybe a week when I started reading a photographers that photographers hate reddit. Terry Richardson came up, but not because of his simple flash setup and high contrast portraits, but because of his model management demeaner. Intrigued that a setup so simple can be so highly lauded in the photographer community, I decided to give it a shot.

The photos I have been trying to recreate in particular are from the recent Miley Cyrus shoot.

I achieved the Terry Richardson look using a single hotshoe mounted flash (Sb-900) set to TTL with at ~1/125 at ~f1.8. If you want to see exactly what I did, you can just look at the EXIF data.

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So if this where Terry Richardson stuff, it would be uncomfortably sexual (I asked Alex to take his shirt off to meet that idea half way) and if this were Tyler Shields stuff, the apples would be guns or domestic abuse references.

In Summary...

I really think this effect is cool. I am totally getting the rock 'n' roller American Apparel vibe off of the high contrast flash. I love how simple it is. I could do event photography like this. It is on camera flash for goodness sake! I could actually take my camera and hotshoe mounted flash places and take candid snapshots that look intentional. This sort of changes my world.

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The 30 Photoshoot speedlight challenge is a Self Challenge where I attempt to learn as much as I can about single source lighting before I graduate to adding a second source to my kit! The reward of course is a second speedlight. I do my best to be reflective about my experiences to make them as instructive as possible. Read more about the 30 photoshoot challenge and follow my journey by clicking on the links below.