Digital Mike

”Digital Mike”. Recreation of the famous Martin Schoellers portrait photography. I wanted to capture the essence of his photographs. Which is a very in your face unforgiving kind of photo, all the skin details that you normally try to hide are showing. I even made nose hair to add to this effect.

I actually hadn’t seen the real light setup he uses, so it was a bit of guessing. I found out later that there was a video on youtube showing the setup. But as I spent two days tweaking to what you see, I didn’t want to change anything again. Getting those highlights correct in the eyes was a pain.

I spent a lot of time researching the camera he uses, hopefully I got all the settings correct. It’s mostly based on information from interviews and reading about the camera on various websites. It’s an RZ 6x7 with 140 mm lens shot on portra 800 iso film. Maybe someone can correct me if I got it wrong?

The mesh is extracted from Unreal Engine 4, made into quads in Blender and cleaned up in maya. Displacement is a convertion of the normal map to height map with Nvidia Texture Tool. Rendered with V-ray for Maya, Yeti for hair, Mudbox for sculpting cleanup and composite in Nuke.