Each year the Camera club in the Wellington region have a print competition. The club that hosts sends out a list of 10 topics. Each club submits one print for each topic. Generally, the topics are fairly lame. However, in 2023, the Kapiti club decided to stir things up a little with the topic “In the style of Helmet Newton”.

For anyone unfamiliar Helmut Newton (born Helmut Neustädter; 31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. The New York Times described him as a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.

I heard about the topic before its release. A member of the Kapiti Club asked whether I could help them source models. I know that recreating some of his work would be very fun and challenging. It was it was a challenge I was very happy to undertake.

As chance would have it, as I was thinking about setting a shoot up, I was approached by Johemiane (@Johemiane). She was a professional nude model from the Czech Republic who was travelling through New Zealand. She was approaching local photographers to earn a little bit of money to fund her travel. I spoke with a couple of photographers from my club. I wanted to see if they were interested in sharing the costs. We booked Joanna for a two hour shoot. The first hour would be shared in the second hour was totally devoted to my own concepts. Because the lighting and arrangement in each shoot is different I have split the two hour session into a series of posts.

The first task was the analyse Helmut’s images to try to determine what was his style. Given that he started photography in 1936 and was shooting right through into the 1990s this was not a simple exercise. However when you looked at his most famous word there were two things that sprung out. Firstly they all portrayed women in strong/dramatic poses. Secondly the lighting was very contrasty and it was clear that he had deployed hard light a lot. While he was mainly known for black & white images, you could see the same style in the colour ones. 

The first look I set out to recreate was an image entitled “They Come” shot in 1981. In his original image helmet had photographed four models in the latest Vogue fashions he then got them to repeat the same pose except they were fully nude.

The lighting in the image indicates that it is a single night coming from Camera left. They are short on a seamless white background. I see that exactly the same arrangement I initially positioned the light camera right. As this was part of the session with the other two photographers, I made things easier. I used a constant LED light that I had recently acquired. The idea was that they would not have to much about swapping out the trigger.

We started with Johemiane fully clothed. By using a constant light my settings where is f5.6 1/125s IS0800. The image below is an example example of what these settings produced. They were not exactly what I was looking for.

So I powered up an Elinchrom D400 and positioned it camera left. It was in a 7″ reflector which gave a very hard light. I left the constant light in place to provide fill.

I also determined that the black dress was not working so I had Johana change into a pink one.

It was there a matter of getting here to do a number of strong poses. As my usual practice I was shooting tether to the computer. Once the clothed shots were taken, we reviewed them in the computer, and chose the ones that we wanted to repeat nude.

The computer was positioned just out of shot but where Johemiane could see it. The other great feature with the Panasonic tether app is that you can select a previous image and use it as an overlay while shooting the next image. This meant that we could get Johana to adjust her poses to exactly align with the clothed shots.

Then in photoshop it was a simple matter of bringing the two images together.