Evan Rachel Wood

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

IT WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THAT EVAN RACHEL WOOD was prepared to have her photo taken. At the film festival and elsewhere, most actresses will arrive for interviews and photo sessions with hair and makeup people on hand. Most of them seem to regard this as a somewhat regrettable necessity, and usually present themselves with a carefully put-together "natural" look.

Wood, on the other hand, had clearly thought about how she wanted to be seen, and had collaborated with whoever did her hair and makeup on a look that wouldn't have been out of place in the studio of a portrait photographer working for one of the big studios in the '30s and '40s. As someone who'd spent a lot of time studying the work of people like George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull, I was both surprised and grateful when she walked through the door of the room at the Intercontinental.

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

I didn't, of course, have the benefit of a barrage of fresnels with barn doors providing spot and kick lighting. All I had was whatever big, soft light made its way into the room through a window - an uncommonly large one for the Intercontinental, looking at these shots - and a big black curtain that had somehow made its way into the room.

Just as she had put a lot of thought into her look, Wood also knew how to pose without much direction from me, and I was pretty pleased with the results even as I was shooting. But just as with Hollywood glamour photography, I've done a lot of careful retouching in Photoshop after the fact to give Wood's skin an even more flawless finish. The free daily's Canon EOS 30D only put out an 8.2 megapixel image uncompressed, and I was shooting compressed jpeg at ISO 800, but the resolution was still remarkable, and needed to be smoothed out to achieve the look that I'm sure Wood wanted to deliver that day.

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007