Week 34: Remembering Rosie
By: dani photography
Tags: 1942, America, bandanna, blue, Challenge, determination, dots, factory, homage, inspiration, J. Howard Miller, labor, polka dot, Portrait, poster, propaganda, red, rosie the riveter, Self Portrait, strobe, Strobist, texture, We Can Do It, white, woman, work force, worker, world war II, wwII, yellow
Category: Photography
I’ve been looking forward to this shoot for two weeks! “Rosie the Riveter”, the classic American WWII propaganda poster. For a fresh reminder of the original illustration, please see the side by side comparison below. I’ve always loved the colors, pose and lighting. So why not give it a shot!
Props were the first thing on my list. The bandanna was made from an old tank top. I happened to have the work shirt, although it isn’t navy blue, I decided it was close enough. Moving on to hair and makeup, I looked to the illustration for inspiration. It was really fun actually, and I wish I could get away with it more often 
I set up my lights to recreate the poster lighting.
The key light is a flash, at1/4 power, shoot thru umbrella, camera left, at about a 45-degree angle. The fill light is a bare flash, at 1/16 power, camera right, aimed at the shadow side of my face. In the end, I think the lighting came out really close!
Then the best part.. trying to find the right pose. Abe was a wonderful help with this, and kept telling me to lean back more, lean back more, chin down, elbow up.. He doesn’t even realize how much of a help he is. Thanks Abe. We got it after about 30 shots. That pose is hard! And totally unnatural.
We shot against the white wall of my studio, so from there on out, the post-production was done in Lightroom and Photoshop. The fine-tuning included masking, blending modes, textures, skin softening and some (subtle) transformation of the facial features to look more like “Rosie”. I took some artistic license with the textures and colors. But, like any homage, it is my interpretation of the classic.
This shoot was, among a select few others, the most fun of the series. I’m finding my favorites are, by far, the ones that involve the most photo manipulation, the most lighting challenges, and detailed post-processing. I love it.
Please see the original illustration, and my homage, side by side for comparison.
Thanks for looking!
dani
Like this:
3 comments on “Week 34: Remembering Rosie”
Leave a Reply
Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Duotone by Automattic. Fonts on this blog.
You really nailed the pose!
Thanks! It took a lot of help from Abe. The pose may look natural, but was actually really hard to do, and quite uncomfortable. It also doesn’t help that the Rosie illustration has crazy long arms, and I don’t. But I think I pulled it off pretty well
[...] Week 34: Remembering Rosie This image taught me that posing is hard! I don’t want to remember how many shots it took to contort myself into this pose, but let me tell you, it’s much harder than it looks! Of the handful of homages I completed over the year, this was the only one that needed to be spot-on. And my arms just aren’t as long as Rosie’s, haha! Fortunately, I also learned that the “liquify” tool is an amazing secret weapon. With great power comes great responsibility. I used it to distort my face to be more like Rosie’s, with full lips and expressive eyebrows. [...]