Saturday, February 21, 2015

Mystery Lady

Today I want to write about a photoshoot we did a few weeks ago (yes it takes time before I am even done with the editing and can go on to blogging).

The shots were taken in a pool joint / bar, and the lighting was completely artificial. Which makes it easier in a lot of senses. It also lets you do whatever you want when it comes to light and color.

In this first post from the photoshoot I want to introduce Tal, a beautiful new model I had wanted to work with for a while now. Finally this production took us to Beer Sheva and things worked out.

The theme in this set is masks, and it was part of a session we did for Purrim (the Jewish masquerade holiday).

Model: Tal Ratson | Styling: Jeni Ageev | Hair and makeup: Andrey Zukal | Dress: Natali Boychuck



The location, as I've mentioned, was a rather dark bar at the back of a pool/pub in Beer Sheva.


The lighting is a simple two-light setup, one flash+umbrella on a light stand at camera left, and another bare flash with orange gel and a bit of cardboard as a barn-door on the camera right.



The white balance was tweaked to emphasize the color contrast for the two light directions, where the flash from the right was already much more orange to due to the gel.

























Here I am trying some more interesting angles. The image on the right is from a lower angle looking into the flash (sans umbrella). The image on the left is using a 17mm standing on a bar stool above the model.



























The Christmas lights in the background are another improvised light source I brought with me. I think for any kind of night photography these are going to be pretty useful. They're actually white colored, but the key light here is gelled orange so the white balance could be cooled down enough to make them look blue.




I really like the image below. It isn't technically very good, there is no fill light, the colors are all unnatural, but here expression is interesting, and the heavy shadows makes this an intriguing image in my mind.


Finally we come to the obligatory panorama by 105mm composite. For this kind of shots I had to turn off the camera-right flash, as it took too long to recharge and making these composites without letting the model move too much is hard enough when you are shooting at your camera's rate. The flash was miss-firing too often so I let it go. Again, the really deep shadows are actually quite appealing, I think.



Thanks a lot to Tal for being patient letting my test out all possible lighting setups... and of course to Andrey for the hair and makeup, and to Jeni for the styling (and for arranging the location in the first place).

Soon more posts with other looks from the same photoshoot and even more surprises.

Make sure to check out the facebook album for this set as well as the other sets.

















No comments:

Post a Comment