Thorsten Overgaard

From a Western materialistic viewpoint it's complete rubbish. From a Eastern, say Buddhist, it's completely logically. By the way, one will be reincarnating in circles around the same persons, making family members take different roles as parents, kids, spouse, etc throughout eternity. Make it even more logical that my kids will come to decide over me (which is why they got an iPod very early).

Hey, did I throw you all out of this universe. All right, let's get back on track.

But it’s a big thing these years, being rich and famous, not just amongst teenagers, also amongst grown-ups. They would like to be rich and famous. It’s in surveys again and again (which is why, if you eat Kelloggs, you will become rich and famous, according to the artwork on the package).

Anyways, I think talent is a fair basis for fame and becoming rich. Fame in itself is a tricky thing and may often imply doing odd things to acquire it, and perhaps loosing that fame very fast.

If you'r fame is not based on talent, it's basically not your fame and could be taken away by whoever installed you with it.

You go a long way with talent.

But she’s become more serious about it, and after we went to some fashion shows, she really liked the idea.

So ok, we shot a series that will go to a model agency and we’ll see what happens. I’ve told both my kids, that they better start figure it out and become serious – as to what they want to do – because they’re expected to be able to buy their dad a Ferrari before they turn 18 ;-)

Oliver might invent some new bloody game, I guess, or become the first paid online gamer. Who knows?

Or succumb in his room with empty pizza boxes and Coca Colas bottles – in which case I will have to take the bus. Actually I don't have ambitions on behalf of my kids. I think they will do nutty things, fun things, and I'm confident they will do whatever they will do, well.

In my school we had kids who's parents would declare that their son was going to be a doctor, and often the boy himself believed he would (sometimes even behaving as he had acquired that status). However, I've also noticed that almost all of those going-to-be-kids never became anything.

Gave uo life, became tired of being doctors, lawyers and all before ever getting there...
It was kind of interesting shooting her for real, in a half-formal way, though only 45 minutes. Even that is longer than ever before, and she always complains it’s boring. Which is a viewpoint she might have to change if she want to become a paid model.

But in shooting with her, I discovered she might have some talent. By which I mean some uniqueness that is different from other young girls who want to become rich and famous.

She has this drifting look which is really cool. Mostly because you seldom see it that often on models.
I mean, her own response to the pictures was that she didn’t like them all because she didn’t look smiling on all of them!
We’ll see what the agency think about it.

Another thing I noticed, when doing the PhotoShop thing, was that her skin was very good and needed no fixing of dead skin or other stuff. I mean, you just throw her in front of a camera and she looks like she does.

What I do in PhotoShop and which is something I might get back to in depth later, is a series of very distinct tools, that all aim at “painting with light” in certain places. I seldom do general adjustments of levels or colors or stuff.

Here’s the difference between before and after a 4 minutes touch-up in PhotoShop:
I mainly use dodge and burn. I dodge highlights to become 10% lighter, and then I burn shadows to become 10% darker.

That mean you choose the tool, say dodge, set it at 10% intensity, makes sure what is being dodged is highlights (not midtones or shadows), and then I run that tool over the eyes, the hair, jewrelry and anything other that is bright and shining. The more times you run over a piece of the picture, the brighter the highlights become.

Skin can’t take that much dodge, only very light and make sure you don’t change the face expression or shape by doing it.

I often also use it to calarify lines, say the chin, details around the nose and stuff. That bring you into drawing or painting for real.

I think a rule in portrait and model photography is not changing the characteristics and personality. Fix dead skin, make the appearance more brilliant. But leave birthmarks, scars and other personal stuff untouched.

Burn brings in contrast and shape. Be careful not to burn tiredness into the face by making the area under the eyes to dark. Just slightly add contrast. And don’t smear the face with darkness so the person looks dirty.

The philosophy behind this is from the Danish painter P. S Krøyer. Around 100 years ago there was a colony of painters, poets and writers living part of the year in the farthest North part of Denmark, Skagen, because the area is surrounded by water and other things that create an incredible nice light.

But P. S. Krøyer’s paintings had something about them that I was wondering for some months about what was. I’ve even been standing glaring very close to his paintings to see if it was the amount of paint, the color harmonies or whatever made them so lively and sparkling.

So one day I noticed what it was, as you can see here:

The lower one is the original and in the upper one I’ve removed all the highlights in the picture. The upper one is a cool picture. The lower one is an amazing one.

Because what he does is that he make unnatural highlights by using a tinted color. If yellow brass, he mixes white paint with a little yellow and add nightlights. If a blue or grey bottle, he mixes white paint with a little blue and adds highlights with that color.

Tinted colors often appear much more clear and strong than clean white or clean colors. For example 90% yellow is much stronger than 100% yellow. So if you’re doing a packaging for Kelloggs you really want to stand out in the shop, make it 90% tallow instead of 100% yellow. It will appear as a special yellow that might even light in the dark…

Another reason for using tinted colors is color harmony. If you added a field of white paint with a little blue in a piece of brass it would break the harmony. So you have to add yellow to create an adjacent harmony.

Ever used a color wheel? On that you can see which colors goes how with which. Say, green goes well with blue-green because it’s a adjacent harmony.

Red and green is opposite on the wheel and cerate a contrast.
Which has really nothing to do with this subject, though interesting for many other reasons. I forgot which color wheel is state of the art, but shoot me an e-mail if you really want to know (it’s in another building right now). Many weird ideas of color compositions and wheels exist, but there's one simple wheel which look very much as the above and contains the basic facts of colors.
P. S. Krøyer really loved brass and when you look throughout his production you will notice how he never left the chance to create brilliant lively brass in his paintings!
Note how he uses highlights in hair, cups, spoons and all. And how he uses tinted colors to create some sort of highlight in the clothing and all. I mean, you can’t buy a dress that beaming anywhere!

An interesting thing with this technique is that things appear sharper. In the before/after example of Caroline above, the only difference in sharpness is dodge/highlight. Yet the whole thing appears sharper. Hair can appear so nice and sharp and clear it’s unbelievable.

Look at the hair on the above painting. It's really not hair, but it just looks like very sparkling and sharp hair, doesn't it. It's handling of light.

But mainly pay attention to the eyes, which apart from being the “mirror of the the soul” is also a kind of humanoid jewelry.

I should mention that if people have glasses, jewelry around their neck or on the ears, highlight it as well. Work with the contrast in it. In the same was as a beautiful woman can radiate royalty and class with nice diamond earrings, so can you add class and sparkling royalty – or simply life – to a person and the whole scene in the picture by upgrading their jewelry and stuff.

Jeans, by the way, is an intersting thing to work with, because you can hightlight the light fibres inthe jeans, then burn the dark blue ones. The result will be very lively and sparkling jeans. Looks very clean, too!

All this of course leaves us with the never-ending question. Just how far should we go in PhotoShop?

When you look at the old photographers, you will notice that some of the great documentary and war photos from World War I and II has been fixed in the darkroom so that there’s suddenly a person more in the photo (for dramatic effect or for balance), as well as a lot of other stuff we thought was only possible in today’s world.

But no.

We can discuss, but I think it’s somewhere along the theme of being truthful and loyal. And I mean to both the person(s) in the pictures, as well as the audience looking at it.