Photoshoot with Becky - 14th November 2011

We went to a friend’s house for a Halloween Party last month and our beautiful hostess Becky was looking great in her outfit and reminded me that it had been well over a year since I last shot with her. So striking when the iron is hot, we had a chat about it and she was also keen on having some images showing her more dominant side, which would be perfect in the outfit she was wearing.

So a few days and emails later we had a date booked and some other ideas to shoot. In the time between the shoot happening we had a further chat, as we had talked in the past of an idea  my wife had thought of  which we had never got around to doing which was based on the Spartacus Blood and Sand TV series as well as a new idea of my wife’s involving cherries.

On the day of the shoot my wife was not well with a migraine so we decided to just do the shoot with Becky on her own and maybe do the Cherry idea depending how my wife felt at the time, and put the Spartacus idea on hold for another day.

We did the shoot in the studio and I used a very simple lighting set-up with a large soft box to model left and a light from behind with a snoot to act as a hair light.  This worked perfectly for the first two outfits Becky was wearing and an example of each can be seen below:

Then we decided to do some nude shots of Becky with material hanging from the ceiling and Becky using the material to wrap around herself. To create some movement in the hair and the material I turned on a fan. I started this with the idea of using only one light but as the idea developed I added a light to the rear to have some light coming through the back of the material which worked really well. As the material was red I also added a red gel to this light, which gave me an idea of adding another light with a blue gel attached and I will let you all be the judge of whether this worked or not.

I normally go for very simple lighting in the studio, but sometimes it is nice to just experiment when there are no pressures to get great images and I find working with friends allows me to do this much more than working with a model for the first time, where as a photographer you are expected to get her images she can use in her portfolio. I have been very lucky over the last few years and a lot of the models I have worked with have also become friends and are more than willing to let me experiment when the mood takes me.

My wife was felling a little better so we decided to try the cherry idea that she had, which was basically Becky and her both biting on cherries at the same time. I wanted to use this theme to try and get an image where the faces were silhouettes and just the Cherries are correctly lit. To do this I used a large soft box as the background and then used a front light with a snoot to highlight the cherries. This though still gave me too much light on the faces, so I taped over the snoot to give just a pin prick of light. Once the lighting was set-up we then tied the cherries using some catgut and suspended them from a stick with Becky’s husband Trevor holding them so they dangled between Becky and Karenza’s mouths and then just played with different ideas and positions of the cherries, adjusting the lighting in various ways as things developed. This was a very slow process but in the end we captured the image I envisaged before the shoot.

It was a very enjoyable and relaxed shoot with the opportunity to try different things and now I need to arrange another date to get Becky and Karenza together to do the Spartacus Blood and Sand idea we have.