Beauty Shoot 1

I was asked to shoot a beauty feature for a large newspaper, the premise was easy enough, white background and a model and I could light it how I wanted. I decided to go directional, by this I mean use a hard light.

My weapon of choice was a Beauty Dish with a honeycomb grid attachment and have this high and left of camera. What I wanted was the magic triangle of light on the rear of the face as you can see from the final shot, yet still be low enough to throw light into the eyes as well without creating shadow under the eyelids.

The background was whited out by a couple of elinchrom heads shooting into white poly boards, they were about a stop hotter than the front light to ensure a nice clean white backdrop and also give the chance of a small bit of bounce back which I like. This gives a softer edge on the skin which can be seen if you look at the right hand side of the models face. There was only really minimal retouching here. A few removals of blemishes and a bit of hair work (cleaning up strays etc), the model had really good skin, coupled with good lighting and great make up it sure does make your day that much easier!

Make up was done by the fantastic Oonagh Connor from the Joy Goodman agency!

hope you like it…

 

A Beauty Hair Shoot

Fun and Colourful Portraits.

I got asked by a regular client of mine if I could shoot portraits of all of their staff.

The brief was to make sure they were natural and injected some of their personality into the images and were not forced  or awkward looking. The Pr agency as a whole are a fun and dynamic one so after a bit of deliberations, we (the client and i) opted to use a background wall which was really bright and colourful (this colour scheme also was used on their business cards too so it would tie in quite well with that). Lighting wise, I kept it quite simple, I did not have too much room to play with with so it was important that I controlled the light as I did not want backlights spilling onto the subjects like a cut light might. I used a gridded head for the background which channelled the light onto the wall and away from the sides of the face. The front light was a small soft box, (ungridded, so if any light did spill onto the back it would smooth out the light on the background cast by the gridded dish). I used a silver reflector under the front light to clear up any shadows in the eyes or under the chin… the rest was trying to make the subjects as relaxed as possible, smiling and generally making it a pleasant experience! The end result was great, a really good set off natural portraits. Hope you like them!

A selection of a few portraits

Album Cover Shoot

I was asked by a local singer/songwriter if i could take some shots for his forthcoming album.. obviously I said yes! When constructing the ideas in my head I wanted some atmosphere to the shoot, positivity and generally a bit of mood and movement. The location was in a forest out towards crawley, east sussex and I wanted the images quite warm and with a sunset feel. I used my Bowens Pioneer portable flash, some pocket wizards and my trusty 5DMK2 with a 70-200 mm lens on. I chose this lens as I wanted to shoot on maximum focal length on a shallow depth of field to blow out the background. I got the artist in position and away we went…. I added some warmth to the image by raising the colour temperature of the photo to accentuate the sunset look, upped the contrast and really very little else was done, there were other images in the edit but I felt this was the most natural and in accordance with my initial brief, I felt it met the brief perfectly, there was a bit of motion blur, but I actually preferred that, it gave it a relaxed and non set-up/staged feel.

 

Hope you like it.. enjoy!