Golden Century Style Photographing

Suppose you’ve got a client that wants you to turn the clock back to the 17th Centruy. To the ‘Dutch Golden Century’ to be more exact. This client sells dairy products and want you to create a photo to bring back to life that feelling of enthusiasm and momentum Holland’s Golden Century was know for. A key visual is needed to demonstrate a new type of cheese that will be known as ‘Old Dutch Master’. Sound like a though job doesn’t it?

Henri Vos is the photographer that picked up the challange. If you know a thing or two about the paintings from the 17th century you might remember they always show a lot of food on a table and the artists played with the light and composition a lot. Cloths are usually draped along the table and are combined with things like grapes, plates, tin cans, bread an other items. Well that doesn’t sound all that difficult now does it?

Until you take a closer look that is. It turns out those exact kind of grapes are no longer available at your everyday grocery store. Another kind of grape took over. And nobody produces bread like they did back then. Or tin cans and bottles of juniper (a Dutch kind of gin). Plus, you can’t just grab any kind of tin can. The design of the tin can has to match the century. Getting this job right was not going to be ‘a walk in the park’.

It took several weeks of planning and the help of a very qualified stylist (Floortje Klomp from Amsterdam) to find all those items. Thanks to Floortje’s network Henri was able to import the specific grapes from somewhere at the border of Europe. Floortje also managed to track down an original and very old tin can as well as several very old bottles of juniper. These had never been opened since they were first bottled several hundred years ago. Yes, this was the real thing all right. (And even though they were still sealed with a cork and wax they were empty nonetheless). Floortje also studied how the old masters draped the cloth and made sure the colors of all the props would match the cloth and the cheese of course.

After all the props (and cheeses!) had been found (or created especially in case of the breads) Henri and Floortje could set up the composition. After that it was time for Henri to experiment with the ‘light-plan’. The way the light is captured in these old paintings was not easy to replicate. Henri finally found the right mood when he combined flash light with artificial (or ‘film’ light). He used a 700 Watt spotlight to give the entire composition a glow and covered one of his big studio lights with a black piece of paper. In this paper he ripped and punctured holes and experimented with cutting and pasting it back up until it produced the warm beams of light he was looking for. A few mirrors helped to guide another light source.

Although Henri used an ‘old fashioned’ analog “6×7” Large Screen Camera he also made sure to shoot a lot of photo’s using his new digital camera. And –as it turns out– those digital shots proved to be the best. Henri and Floortje finshed the entire shoot (with several different kind of cheeses, compositions and light-plans) in just one day. After reviewing all the photo’s both the client and Henri agreed this was the best shot. It was to be used in the packaging but then something else happened…

The client had seen the photo of course and they were so enthusiastic about the project, they decided to send it to their colleagues. The photo got forwarded to other colleagues inside the company and pretty soon Henri received word colleagues around the world (from the Middle East to America) wanted this picture on their office wall. This was ‘something else’! This was a photo for one of their cheeses like they had never seen before and everyone wanted a copy. It was decided the photo was to be printed on a large size, framed and send all over the world.

A job well done!

View the larger format image: Frico_ODM_lijst.jpg