By Jenn Gidman
Images by Jonathan Thorpe
When you see a Jonathan Thorpe photo, you know it. He approaches his commercial work with an eye on storytelling and humor, as well as a signature visual style that often involves saturated colors and a hyperrealistic look accomplished with meticulous lighting.
For his portraits, he achieves all of this by placing his subjects square in their environment. "I try to avoid photographing my subjects in the studio whenever possible, because I don't like them being out of context," he explains. "They'll be more comfortable in their own surroundings and it will tell their story better."
The two lenses he uses the most for his portraits: the Tamron SP 24-70mm VC, which has been a workhorse for him across the board, and the new SP 15-30mm VC Wide-Angle. "I love using the 15-30 because of the extra-wide angle on the front end that gives minimal distortion, which is usually the issue with wide-angle lenses," he says. "With other lenses like this, you get into the corners and the straight lines get wonky. When I shoot portraits with the 15-30 at the 15mm end, though, there's basically no distortion in the center of the lens where it normally would be if I were using a fisheye, plus it shows the environment around my subject, which is really cool. There's not another wide-angle lens on the market that can do that yet, especially at the price point that the Tamron lens is at, and it's got the Vibration Compensation (VC) image-stabilization feature as well."
Whether he uses the 15-30 or the 24-70 when taking his portraits depends on the situation. "What am I shooting? How much space do I have to shoot it in?" he says. "A lot of times I like to shoot the image wider, for example, so when I get back to my computer, I'm not stuck with one tight angle in the shot if I want to crop it."
Jonathan can only get what he's looking for when his subject is relaxed in front of the camera. "When I'm shooting for an assignment, like for a magazine, and I have to take my subjects out of their environment, it can often be uncomfortable for them," he explains. "But with environmental portraits, they're on their own turf. It's easier to get them to be compliant. Put someone up against a blank wall and say, 'Smile,' and it's going to be awkward. But put a soccer ball under a soccer player's foot or a piano player in front of a piano, and they won't be thinking about the camera. They'll be concentrating on what comes naturally to them. That's when I get the real story."
This is especially true when he doesn't get a lot of time with his subjects beforehand and they're especially awkward in front of the camera, like the owner of a movie theater he photographed. "He was rigid when we started out in the studio," Jonathan says. "So I suggested we walk down the street to where his theater was located and take some photos out in the street. He's a quirky guy, into horror movies and stuff, and when he was in front of his own theater is when I got the emotion and expressions out of him. As soon as I got him in his element, everything changed."
Jonathan doesn't place his subjects in stiff poses, but rather lets the photo evolve organically with the subject's own movements and personality. "I talk a lot and make a lot of jokes on set so my subjects kind of forget what's happening," he says. "I'll tell them how much I hate my own picture getting taken, for instance, or something else to relate and get on their level. I also try to pick up on their personality during these conversations to gauge what approach I'll use to loosen them up."
On one of Jonathan's assignments, he had to photograph a bartender for Belle Isle, a spirits company in Virginia. "They were doing a '12 Days of Drinks' for a Christmas catalog and promoting different master bartenders on the East Coast," he says. "I photographed this bartender while he was making a special apple-pie drink. He had a Scottish accent, the whole deal, and he was reserved and didn't really want to talk to me—he just wanted to make his drink. So when he started mixing and pouring, I joked, 'Man, I'm already drunk,' and that's when he cracked that smile and I took the photo."
For Jake Clemons, the saxophone player for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Jonathan wanted to show another side of him. "On stage he's big and loud, but when he's off the stage, he's very reserved and contemplative," he says. "So I put him in the back of the car and said, 'Don't look at the camera, just be in your own thoughts.' That's how we got this really cool, thoughtful photo."
His lighting scheme, Jonathan admits, is unconventional. "When I speak about portrait lighting with other photographers, many say they set up the key light on the subject first, then work from there," he says. "I do it backwards, from back to front: I light the environment first, then the sides of their face, then set up the key light. I like to control everything in the room, starting with the room itself. And when you concentrate on the lights for the sides of the face, you can almost see every pore or every hair on the chin, which gives me the hyperrealistic look I'm going for."
He photographed the owner of a wood warehouse and employed this technique. "It was overcast the day we did that session, so we put lights up outside those windows coming into the warehouse," he says. "I wanted to make it look like we had sunlight streaming in. The same with the picture of Paula Deen's son Jamie: It was also a cloudy day, so before I even worried about lighting him, I made sure we had light coming in through that window."
Jonathan re-created cozy bar lighting in the image he took of the bartender. The bar had no ambient light, so Jonathan had to work his lighting magic. "Those two little lamps next to the bartender were turned off during the shoot," he says. "I added a little glow on the bulbs and in the hot wires in post-production. Then I set up the lights behind him, back where the chefs work under the awning. There was some lighting coming in from his left side, and there was a big dish overhead. I wanted to get as much light as possible on the bottle, on the beverage, and on the apples to make it look like a regular bar light. It just took five or six lights to make that happen."
He supplements his lighting for that hyperrealistic vibe even when he's outside. "For the movie theater owner, for example, I used two lights on either side of him—I wanted those really harsh highlights on his cheeks," he says. "Then there were the lights overhead to light his face, and we also had an 8-foot parabolic reflector. The light behind him was the sunlight that was there. My goal was simply to re-create what the light would look like to the eye."
Knowing how to use a shallow depth-of-field judiciously can make or break an image. "Many people get an F/2.8 or F/1.4 lens and that's all they shoot at," Jonathan says. "But when you're storytelling, you have to know what the line is between what you want to show and what you want to tell."
He uses the image of Clemons as an example of leaning more into the story than into the technical. "He took over as the saxophonist for the E Street Band after his uncle Clarence Clemons, one of the founding members, died," Jonathan explains. "So he has this huge legacy, and I wanted this photo to be an exploration of what his career was before next to what career now lies ahead of him. I didn't want to do a photo of him with a huge smile, like, 'Hey, I'm living the dream!' I wanted a portrait of the reflective person he is, not concentrating on his instrument (which is in the seat in back of him). I wanted to show him as the person he is, not the product he is when he's with his instrument on stage."
To see more of Jonathan Thorpe's work, go to www.jthorpephoto.com.