Photoshoot Mandy 13th August 2011

I thought I had better get my Blog up to date before my shoot tomorrow with the lovely Clover who I have had the pleasure of shooting with more times than I can remember over the last few years.

I did a shoot in the studio with Mandy a few days ago, this was the first time Mandy had been in front of a camera as she is not a model, but just wanted some nice images for herself.

At this time of the year I rarely use my studio as I prefer to get out on location, as I will be stuck in the studio enough over the winter months.

Whilst I have a very comprehensive studio set-up with in excess of 5 lights I mostly use only one light with a large octagon softbox and this was the set-up I used for the shots of Mandy. Saying that, for some of the images I did incorporate a hair light. I also mostly use a black paper background as this gives me lots of options in post production.

Mandy although nervous was great fun to work with and really warmed to it, as the shoot progressed.

In post production I used some of the images to experiment with using different backgrounds and incorporating them into the shots by use of blend modes and layer masks. I should say I use Photoshop CS5 for all my editing.  Mostly my post production workflow is very simple as in tidying up skin, background, changing image to B&W and then using dodge and burn as required before adding contrast. I do not use the actual dodge and burn tools though, but rather use a method of creating empty layers with a blend mode set to soft light and paint on these with either black or white paint set to a low opacity as I feel this is less destructive and allows me to keep going back to make further adjustments if required.

While I am not a big lover of doing loads of editing on images as I prefer to try and get it right in camera, I do find it fun adding different backgrounds, elements to images afterwards, although sometimes these experiments work and sometimes they don’t I will let you all be the judge.

Photoshoot Syren 13th August 2011

I did a shoot on Saturday 13th August with Syren, this was the first time I had worked with her and decided that we would try and do some art nude shots with an erotic twist.

As seems to be the norm for me at the moment we went to an old falling down building which I use a lot, and all the images where taken using flash from a Canon 580ex strobe with umbrella. I under exposed the image by a few stops and let the flash light the model how I wanted with the background going dark.

Overall I am fairly happy with the results and attached are a few of the images I have edited so far. Interesting this was one the of the few rare occasions where I actually liked a few of the images in colour as normaly I am a lover of B&W with lots of contrast. Saying that think I only kept about 3 of the images in colour:-)

Photoshoot with Adreena 15th August 2011

Well after just 2 weeks of creating a blog I am already behindJ so here goes, today I have set myself a target to at least get uploaded about my shoot with Adreena, and then only one other photoshoot to write up, not that I have edited all the images from the last 3 photoshoots. So need to get stuck into that as soon as.

Mostly these days I try and keep my shoots to weekends, but after much discussion I managed to get a shoot setup with Adreena who had found me through Purestorm, but I believe Clover recommended me to her. Anyway I had to take some time off work as we arranged to shoot on a Monday. But it was very much worth it as Adreena was an absolute joy to work with and brought some great outfits as well as Ballet Boots which I love. I also discovered very quickly that Adreena is the first model I have met that can actually walk in them.

For the shoot we went to my normal location of a collection of falling down buildings. I am going to be seriously devastated if they ever get around to knocking them all down!

We started off doing some shots with the Ballet Boots and an amazing corset that Adreena had made to measure, before moving onto some fetish type images which I wanted to make much more casual as in not posed to much. I used the same techniques for lighting as mentioned in my previous post, this has become my normal work mode and mostly these gives me the results I desire with just minor tweaking of camera setting and placement of the light.

I was really pleased with the results and I am hoping to work with Adreena again as she is so versatile.