David Zentz’s portrait series “Reverb” was inspired by a memory. A student he knew back in film school had devised a rig that suspended the camera to free float between tension wires, allowing the student to create a vibrating effect for a scene in which the character was launched into space, Zentz explains. “I never saw the rig, but the effect worked pretty well,” he says, so he was inspired to try something similar for a portrait series. Zentz describes the setup:

“I mounted the camera to a rig I built out of two-by-fours and bungee cords, which sat on a tripod about 6 to 10 feet from the subject. The camera was mounted on a small square rig that was suspended inside a larger square rig by bungee cords at each corner. This allowed me to move the camera along the X and Y axis, sometimes slightly tilting it to throw focus or distort the edges of the silhouette and then return to center for the final frames without having to refocus.

“First, I would ask the subject to hold a pose and not move. Then I would prefocus on their eyes using a modeling light. Watching the screen on the back of the camera, I would take exposures of about six silhouettes, moving the camera slightly each time. In multiple exposure mode on a Nikon Z 7, you can see the images stacked on top of one another on the back screen, even though it is saving each exposure as an individual raw file. This allowed me to review the images on the back of the camera as I went and know how many silhouettes are lining up to one another. Once I shot the silhouettes, I returned to the center, flipped on a key light, and made a final exposure or two of the subject’s lit face.

“In post, I chose to shift the silhouettes to blue and then stacked and blended them as a smart object. Finally, I color corrected and retouched the lit exposure of the subject, stacked it on top of the smart object layer, masked it, and painted it back in to expose the subject only where needed.” 

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.