Monika and Joceline

I spent a fun weekend shooting Monika again and then meeting Joceline. I sorted out another shoot at Smile Studios in Lincoln with Monika, I wanted to do some more natural light shots and I wanted some geeky, quirky expressions. Monika is perfect for this as she can do the serious look and then dive straight into cut and quirky.

The shot above is very very simple, all natural light. The only control I took over it was to pull down the blinds on the back windows to diffuse the light a little, the rest of the shot relies on the light that bounces around the room. The windows were slightly overexposed to remove any detail and to help light the shadow areas.

Using exactly the same lighting I took some closeups with my 70-200 lens, the aim was to have a load of foreground and background out of focus. The shot above has had grain added in Photoshop.

The shot above has a reflector added to even out the contrast slightly, the shot was also overexposed and the sunlight was flared into the lens to further reduce contrast. Then I went a bit nuts in Photoshop and stripped out most of the colour.

The ultimate version of this is flaring the light right into the lens and washing out almost all of the detail. It can be a bit hit an miss as the light, the pose and the focus don’t always work together on each image. The above image has had some contrast adjustments and sharpness around Monika’s eyes and the glasses to make them stand out.

Another way to potentially bodge up your shots is to shoot with reflections in the glass, I move around a lot when I am shooting so I thrashed out a sequence of images as Monika moved around on the bed, all but the first few had a really bright reflection obscuring Monika, the joy of digital is you can check each image, rework the angles and limits of movement and shoot them again. So we talked about the limits of movement and we shot another sequence. The processing on the above image is very simple, remove saturation, add colour washes, brighten and a little contrast, then sharpen around the glasses again to make them jump.

Next up was the ringflash, I wanted to try and get a slightly softer version of a ringflash shot, there isn’t much point talking about the setup, stick the ringflash on the front, set the power take shots! Just remember to make adjustments if you move closer or further away. I love the wall paper at the location and made sure it became part of the composition. Monika performed a great variety of wide eyed and quirky expressions.

The processing was really simple, I switched the white balance to give a warmer look than the auto white and desaturated the image. That was it. Monika was sat right against the wall so the falloff in light was perfect for the balance of the image. I love the muted colours and the sharpness of the image.

More from the set can be found here.

Joceline

The very next day I shot with Joceline. She is a fantastic model and at 6’1 I got a bit of a crick in the neck As a dancer she also has fantastic poise and balance, as demonstrated in this image.

Seriously, you try doing that. Then try it in heels! The lighting is ultra simple, beauty dish to camera right and nothing else. The processing is simple desaturation and cleaning up the background.

The above shot is a simple setup with two softboxes behind and two large polyboards infront, this gives a really soft even lighting, but stil gives some shape as the softboxes act as back light.

The above image is along a very similar theme, trying to even out all of the tones in the image, this does it with more directional light to create shape. The main light is natural light through the window just to the left of Joceline. This is then balanced with a beauty dish firing light from all the way across the room, we had to diffuse the beauty dish with a couple of softbox covers to reduce the light output enough, the shadow from this light can be seen on the backwall, it’s purpose is a fill light to bring up the contrast and create a grey and white image, rather than a black and white image.

The effect is more pronounced in the above image. No changes were made to the lighting but as Joceline is closer to the fill light it is brighter so lowering the contrast ratio between the natural light and the flash.

After that I went a bit nuts and flared the light straight into the lens, the bounced light is coming from two large polyboards and a piece of aluminium giving the sharp staps of light. Not to everyones tastes but I love it.

With very similar lighting I also shot close ups, the processing is simple removing saturation and adjusting levels to bring the contrast back into the image. More from the set can be found here.

Raphaella

Yep, another awesome shoot with Raphaella. We spent the morning shooting some video which will be the subject of another post, but we spent the afternoon shooting stills. This is the reason to work with really good models, the work rate and variety that can be shot in a day is amazing.

First up is an ultra simple natural light image, the bedroom window at the fantastic Smile Studio has light coming in from the front and two sides, so it gives a great wraparound light, I pulled the blinds down on the back part of the window to control the amount of light and to soften it a little. The light from the side windows then frames Raph against the backdrop, the processing is simply a case of removing most of the colour.

The light means I can leap about the room shooting from almost anywhere and Raph can work in the whole space without limitation, in the above image the background is slightly overexposed as I adjusted to make sure there was detail captured at the front of the image. The slash of light on the floor is a little annoying, but these images are shot in a very fluid way, so it is about capturing the moment rather than the ultra perfect image.

I like the vent in the shot, lots of people said get rid of it, some people said keep it. I framed it in on purpose so it stays I shot a number of images in this sequence with loads of space in the frame, I also tried to use the crease in the wall as a framing element. What I think is amazing is how Raph can make a blank expression look really interesting. The light was really simple, a single flash head aimed up at the roof away from Raph at a 45 degree angle. This gave a really soft even light with a slight amount of direction to create shape in the image.

Exactly the same lighting but a much closer shot, I love the wallpaper in this room, the processing here is designed to work with the really soft light and the slight colour in the wallpaper. The only real change in Photoshop is a drop in the saturation, otherwise the shot is pretty much out of the camera.

The two images above are both shot with the ringflash, the light is coming from the camera position so shadows are all but eliminated, this gives a really even tone to the image, but I have kept the crease in the wall in as a compositional element again, I just think it creates an interesting line through the image. The two shots are processed with different colour settings, both have noise added but the upper image has warm tones and the lower cool tones which I think suit the expressions better.

 

 

Raph does a bit of glamour! The two shots above were shot in the amazing tiled bathroom at the studio. Crazy green tiles and retro styling. I loved the backdrop but went back and forth  a lot on how to light it. Directional light didn’t seem to work as the bathroom is long and fairly narrow, so not a lot of places that lights can go. So I went for the ringflash which REALLY brought out the green in the tiles. The processing for the images above involved some exposure and contrast changes, a slight warming up of the colour temperature and then adding a slight white vignette around the edges of the image. More from the set can be found here.