Hendrik Kerstens - Contemporary 17th Century Portraits

I first came across Kerstens' work at the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 and ever since have followed his work avidly. The portraits of his daughter Paula have been a huge inspiration to my Musician portraits as the lighting I found particularly beautiful and loved his modern twist to portraits that could be otherwise mistaken for 17th Century paintings like that of Vermeer and Rembrandt due to his characteristically 'dutch' light used, which I adapted for my own portraits.

I absolutely adore his humorous portraiture and thought I would share this new talent with you all and let you make up your own mind about the too!

Musician Final Series

So I finally decided on a final edit for my musician shoot and am really pleased with the outcome. My final series are taken from throughout the project and are only of the non singers. This is because I felt the two didn't mix and I really loved how absorbed and peaceful the non singers looked. Ideally, if I got more singers to do the shoot I would have loved to have had two series, non singers and singers as some of my favourite images were of Anushka, the jazz singer. But in photography you have to be harsh and your favourite image does not always make the cut if it doesn't fit in with the others.

But anyway, here is my final series and I hope you like them as much as I do!

Click on image to enlarge.