Sorry I helped feed your addiction!
Oh, I'm not sorry *at all*. I remember hearing about them but never went to the trouble of finding some example images to get a good idea of what could be done with them.
Too late. Already done and tickets bought.
Yeah, masa -- is "masa" OK? -- I'm kinda befuddled on what they did for #1 and #3 too. (#2 and #4 seem pretty straight-forward with PS.) They really look like T-Max or Delta. I can't tell from these small images if the originals were film or digital, but I'm pretty sure there were digitally processed somewhere in there. The grain / noise in the background of #1 doesn't match the rest of the image and the forehead blur in #3 doesn't match. Both could be done on an enlarger, but it's a lot easier to do it in a computer.
VM, for how to shoot things like that with film -- it's easier to *shoot* something like this with film 'cause you have, essentially a *much* wider gamut -- you do have pick the right film and paper, of course, and you have to set up the shots well. You essentially need to have well-textured subjects and put them in a relatively dark environment and then have bright key lighting and then expose for the highlights. To further increase the contrast you can underexpose a stop or so and then push it. You can also use colored filters to change the contrast of some colors.
You can do a lot of the same things shooting digital color and then processing it to increase the contrast / raise the black point: it's easier to *process* an image to look like these digitally. You can also use glass filters or mimic that behavior with software. Lemme see if I can dig up an example I did...
Oh, oh. On #2, for *how* to create shadows like that if you don't actually see them when you shoot, pretty much just make a mask -- paper or digital -- out of the highlights and, like she said, burn the shit out of the rest.
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I assumed he used a large aperture and long lens to create the shallow DOF but I don't know how to really jack up the contrast like that.
