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Oli Plenderleith | Photographer

@oli_plenderleith

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Editorial & Corporate Portraits
For founders, creatives & professionals
Published in InStyle & Marie Claire
Private Studio — Schwelm
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Most people don’t realise how much perception is shaped by a single image.

The difference isn’t the person.
It’s how they’re captured.

Portraiture. Built around you. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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7 months ago

Composition.
This one became less about retouching individual details and more about controlling the whole frame.

The face had to lead. The hands needed to frame without taking over. The nails became the colour hit. Hair, skin, fabric, depth of field, contrast — everything had to work toward the same visual hierarchy.

Portrait of @wastarasagt taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

Hair retouching is difficult. Really difficult.

The last post was about adapting the treatment to the subject. This one pushed that even further because the hair became the subject.

The challenge is knowing what to keep and what to remove. Clean too much and it looks artificial. Leave too much and it looks messy. Push the highlights too far and it turns metallic. Flatten the colour and you lose depth.

A lot of the work was simply deciding which detail mattered: cleaning distractions, rebuilding the edge, shaping light and shadow, refining colour, and then pulling it back when it started to feel too perfect.

There’s no fixed formula for where to stop. Hair is hugely subjective, and you could keep working on it forever.

Eventually the question is simple:

Does it still look like hair?

I have a lot more respect for specialist hair retouchers after this one. It is absolutely not easy. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

Beauty, without removing the person.

I wanted to make this after seeing more fully AI-generated imagery appearing in editorial spaces.

Retouching has always involved interpretation — shaping light, colour, skin and detail. But there’s a point where we’re no longer interpreting something that existed. We’re creating a person, a face and a moment that never existed at all.

That troubles me.

For me, photography starts with something real: a real person, real skin, real light, texture, lines, asymmetry and all the tiny details that make a face human.

I retouched this image heavily in places — sculpting the light, refining colour and working on the smallest details — but I didn’t want to erase her. The pores are still there. The lines are still there. The skin is still skin.

I don’t want beauty to mean perfection.

I want it to mean seeing something real more carefully.

As AI becomes capable of creating increasingly flawless people and flawless images, I keep wondering:

are we gaining new creative possibilities, or slowly removing the humanity that made us care about images in the first place? taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

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Before there is an image of someone, there is a person.

Culture, background, experience, ambition, doubt — all of it leaves a mark.

That was the idea behind this series with Kia. Not to create one definitive portrait, but to explore different sides of the same person. Some images are controlled and composed, others darker, quieter and more exposed.

It felt appropriate for someone whose work with Irgendwas mit Culture is built around a similar question: what sits underneath the public version of us, and what has shaped the person we eventually become?

The further we went into the shoot, the less interested I became in making every frame feel consistent. The change in colour, contrast, light and mood became part of the portrait itself.

Maybe identity is like that too. Not one fixed image, but a collection of contradictions.

Kia — photographed in Schwelm.

@kia.zo × @irgendwasmitculture
Photography: @oli_plenderleith taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

Same principles. A completely different problem to solve.

In the last portrait I talked about letting the subject dictate the treatment. That image wanted darkness, colour, atmosphere and contrast. This one needed almost the opposite.

The challenge here was restraint.

There is already so much information in the frame — skin, braids, hands, shearling, leather, jewellery — that pushing detail everywhere very quickly became too much. The face in particular taught me something. I initially went further with the dodge & burn, trying to perfect every transition, and ended up making the portrait worse. I reverted it and started again.

The aim became less about adding detail and more about deciding which detail deserved attention.

The skin needed to remain skin. The hands needed refinement without losing their natural structure. The shearling needed to feel soft, the leather coarse, and the eyes needed enough clarity to remain the first place you look.

So the same principles are still there — separation, colour, detail, shadow and dimensionality — but applied very differently.

I’m learning that good retouching isn’t necessarily about how much you can do to an image. Sometimes it’s knowing what not to touch.

Detail without losing beauty. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

The retouching principles stay consistent, but the treatment has to respond to the subject.

This is a clear move away from editorial corporate work, and it isn’t beauty either. The same attention to detail, separation and shadow remains, but colour can’t be boxed into a formula.

Here, complementary tones push the subject forward, while the haze adds another layer of depth and atmosphere.

What really set the direction, though, was the subject’s presence in front of the lens. That dictated the tone of the final edit. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

Keeping on it. Balancing absolute detail with beauty is a fine line. Sometimes showing everything makes an image feel too crunchy, so the aim is to keep the detail that matters, pull back where needed, and still deliver something that feels like beauty editorial rather than a technical exercise. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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a month ago

Gina.
Portrait Study. taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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2 months ago

Hallo ich hab neue Pressebilder und ihr müsst sagen, was ich als Profilbild haben soll - ich bin für Bild 5 und ihr? 🐭🤝

(Thank you @oli_plenderleith for making me comfortable and giving your best best 🥹🤞🏼) by @oli_plenderleith

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8 months ago

There are people who speak about difficult subjects with clarity instead of noise.

Gina is one of them.

Honest, intelligent and deeply thoughtful — both in public and in person.

A privilege to photograph her.

This is Gina.
@ichbinginapunkt taken in Schwelm, Germany by @oli_plenderleith

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5 months ago