Monday Night Shoot

One of my goals is to expand my network of photography contacts:  be they photographers, consultants, editors,  and as the series of photographs above and below show, models and make up artists.

Through the Model Mayhem network, I have had the chance to get to know folks like Jan, above, Jami, and Nikki.  Along with MUA, Mallory Makeup, and the deft assistance of Armando Tura, we met up at the OLIO studio on Monday night to shoot a few, swap ideas, and in general and perhaps most important, get to know one another.   With the exception of Armando, I had never worked with any of the models or Mallory for that matter.  But hey, the M.O. for  the evening was low risk, very casual, and let just have some fun.

Armando and I did two set ups in the studio.  For the first, my thinking was: let's do a couple of head shots for their portfolio.  Safe soft style, beauty light.  So we positioned the big Photek Softlighter as the main light camera right, with a hair-light kicker behind subject camera left, and strobe on the white background.  We also found it useful to kick up a bit more light from under the subject with the big Sunbounce.  Shiite, that seems like a lot of stuff for a head shot!  And it is, really.  And it looks nice and flattering.  And ironically enough, you won't see any of those headshots in this post!

But what you will see are images from the second set up.   This set consists of a Beauty Dish up high on a boom, a medium sized softbox for fill, and snooted hairlight.  It looked like this:

My shooting position was next to the furnace.  For some of the shots (not seen here though) we augmented the light to the face with a hand held Speedlight with a tight grid aimed by Armando.

Model:  Jami Elizabeth

MUA:  Mallory Makeup

Model:  Nikki Rialp

MUA:  Mallory Makeup

Model:  Jan van Vianen

MUA:  Mallory Makeup

I am happy to say that we all hit it off well and we have agreed to work on developing concepts for Couples Shoot ala' Sid and Nancy for Jami; a forest shoot for Jan which will more than likely have Dionysus/Bacchus theme to it.  I'm thinking Drew Gardner (EPIC FASHION portfolio) meets Velazquez,  and both agree that Caravaggio was indeed a douche bag - a gifted douche bag but still.  And for Nikki, she is going to look into finding a snake -  a big one that comes with a wrangler.  I don't how I would shoot it yet, but I'd welcome the opportunity!