So travelling to one of my favourite nearby Melbourne beaches (well relatively so), time for a beach shoot without any bikini’s and for a girl that isn’t stereotypically shot at the beach. I love doing something non typical from time to time!

Once again Jackel showing her typical modelling skills, making my life easy just jumping from pose to pose and coming up with some great ideas!

For the first set, I tried something new. Because my octabox is so large (135cm) I used it as a scrim/shade as well as the main light. Setting it up in the same direction that the sun was coming from and balancing with ambient, it means that I replace the harsh sunlight with beautiful soft light. The only downside is the area for Jackel to pose in is quite small. It did work extremely well, and is now stored away in my head to use in the future.

The second set was a very typical setup for me using the sun as a rim light and the strobes as a key light. Some of the poses that Jackel was doing for this set were some of the best I have seen. Some beautiful photos were the result. Even if I did look like a dork with rolled up jeans standing in the water. Still, it didn’t scare Jackel off so expect to see plenty more of her in the future!

The close up head shot is my favourite from the set, and I find it to be just a beautiful portrait.

Lighting wise outdoors I used my 135cm Octa (like usual), but in this case, I used both diffusers to have light that was a bit softer. Fighting with the setting sun, I would have liked to set up a rim light, but unfortunately time didn’t allow for it.

Indoors was very simple also, just my 70cm Beauty dish. No lighting on the background, but was bright green so quite easy to compose onto a different background (something I just whipped up, deliberately VERY cheesy). For the indoor shot here, the wonderful Stacey D Makeup Artistry did the face paint.

Hope everybody has a fantastic Easter break and stays safe over the holiday!

Dallas is the first model that I’ve organised entirely via Facebook. I didn’t even realise that she was on Model Mayhem (where most of my shoots are organised) until after the shoot!

As luck would have it, I managed to get my hands on Nikon’s latest flagship camera, the D4 for a few days. A separate review will be coming soon, but let’s just say this thing is phenomenal. This is my second shoot with it, the first one hasn’t been written up yet for various reasons – keep your eyes peeled at a later date for that.

So for this shoot I figured I’d use very similar lighting to how I shot with Samii La Morte, unfortunately this was a bit of a mistake as being later in the day, it was a little too dark to get away with it. So ultimately it came down to my 135cm Octa towards camera left and fairly side on to Dallas. In hindsight, I should have set up a fill light also. Ahhh well, lesson learned.

Change time was quite interesting as well. Neither of us had brought a towel for Dallas to change under, so it ended up being a case of me standing behind her while she faced out towards the water and quickly changed! Luckily there weren’t any boats nearby! We shot with three outfits, but had plenty of changes. Dallas had only quickly put on a spray tan, so knowing that the water would wash this off, we did the outfits standing up first, then again once she was kneeling in the wet sand.

The shot of Dallas’s back, hair and bum is a shot I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve just been waiting for the right model and lighting to do it in. I absolutely love this shot, and while it doesn’t have the model’s face in it, it’s one of my favourite shots I’ve taken.

So the first outfit was Ashley in some very tight pants wearing a jacket with nothing under it. There originally was no plan for any nudity to be involved, but one happened to be taken, which turned out to be one of my favourite shots. It has a real Vogue magazine feel to it, so a real fashion nude image rather than the glamour that I typically shoot. I really like the steps in this shot as it gives a bit of a regular texture to the background, but without taking away from the subject.

Lighting wise, this was really simple and pretty much the same for the majority of the shoot (apart from lighting position). My 135cm Octa with a Ranger RX Action Head firing through it. First set to camera right and balanced with ambient light using the sun on the left.

The second look was a bit less risqué. Still a stunning look. Ashley told me that she hadn’t posed against a wall before, but you really couldn’t tell. All of her poses were really quite natural and worked well. The only one directly against the wall here is the close up of her face. The other one was in the long grass but I kept the light in the same position (although effectively it swapped from right on the closeup to left on the other one). I wanted some nice shadows so the light was positioned directly next to Ashley to create this.

The third and final outfit was taken entirely in natural light. The tutu was a great idea and looks fantastic in the photos. Something very unique! The silhouette was a lot of fun to do also, although was a bit tricky positioning the sky to show between the buildings while keeping them out of frame. The shot was extremely underexposed to bring out the colours in the sky and to make Ashley herself drop to black.

Once again, all makeup was provided by Stacey D Makeup Artistry, along with her assistance in holding the light stand in the breeze!

Ashley is an absolutely brilliant model and I can’t wait to do another shoot with her, and hopefully many more throughout the year!

So once again, Dani lives up to her reputation of giving a shoot all she’s got. Travelling for ages to get to the “studio”, we came up with some absolutely fantastic stuff, and had quite a number of laughs along the way.

Yes, another shoot on seamless white for me, but I just absolutely love how clean it looks. Using my typical setup in this studio with the key light being my 70cm Beauty Dish to camera left and an 18cm reflector on the white paper boomed from overhead.

The interesting thing about this shoot is we pretty much covered my major styles in the one evening. Starting off with some fashion, moving to glamour, some beauty, then back to something fashiony.

The poses with the stool are an idea I’ve wanted to shoot for quite a while. Just let the model play, sit on it, lean on it, etc. (at one stage, Dani picked up the stool to pretend to throw it!).

The white cloth is just some basic cloth I picked up from a fabric store, having in mind to have a model pose with it, or even use it as curtains. I love the shot with this fabric as at a quick glance you can just see a silhouette, but if you look closely, you can see a bit more. Works especially well with Dani’s tattoos.

The close up beauty shot with the red satin (also picked up from a fabric store) is more interesting in the post processing (although that said, as soon as I saw it on the back of the camera, I knew it was one of my favourite shots of the whole shoot). I spent approximately ten hours editing this shot retouching it pore by pore (using a dodge and burn technique and a 5 pixel brush). The hair took two and a half hours alone, along with smoothing the fabric. Dani doesn’t actually need that much retouching, but it is something I like to do every now and again. Ten hours is by far the longest though.

The final shot here is just another one with the red satin, but it looks fantastic bunched up like a dress.

This time, not only makeup was provided by Stacey D, but hair as well. A lot of talent there!

So Samii and Smeer’s (her fiancée) house has a number of rooms in different styles. I’ve been wanting to shoot in different rooms here since I first heard about it! Taking a tour through the house, I see the Tiki Bar, and immediately say “yep, we’re shooting here”.

Once again with Stacey D Makeup Artistry on the job (and her first doing makeup for Samii), we came up with some awesome shots.

Because this is a fashion style shoot, I decided to light this a little differently to normal. They key light was my 70cm Beauty Dish off to camera left and my fill light was my 135cm Octa with both baffles attached as a fill light.

One of the great things about having a set like this meant that I didn’t have to move around between outfits, so it made my life much easier.

After we finished shooting at the Tiki Bar, we went outside to a nearby park to shoot in some natural light (yep, doing this a lot more now). With my makeup artist on reflector duty, I learnt a good lesson to put into practice in the future. Don’t attempt to photograph two people at f/2.8. Yes, if I had have thought about this I would have realised the depth of field is too shallow. Ahhh well, a good lesson for next time.

So Dora is an absolute joy to work with. A wonderful person who really knows how to hold a pose and pose her facial expressions. During the travelling and shooting time, we had some great conversations, and by the end of the day, we were like old friends!

The first few sets we shot were at the place she was staying at. It was provided by a photographer that she was working with while in Melbourne, so he had a room set up in a bedroom style. Perfect! Lighting wise, the stuff on the bed was a combination of my 70cm Beauty dish to camera right and an unknown brand of lighting firing through a large softbox (approx 1m x 1m) for fill to camera left.

While still at the location, we decided to use a body stocking for another set, just up against a plain wall. Once again with the 70cm Beauty Dish to camera left this time. The wall was made pure white in post production (it was fairly close, but only using a single light, it needed a bit of help).

After we left the first location, we drove into Melbourne to shoot at the Botanical Gardens. For this, I did something very unusual for me, and shot with natural light (ie. no strobes were used). Being a bright day with the sun overhead, the white hat made for a lovely diffuser on Dora’s face, softening the light. A technique I might use again in the future! From the gardens, we wandered around Melbourne, near the Arts Centre (which is where the tram shot was taken), around various alleyways and back to the car.

We decided that on such a nice day, to go do some beach pics. Driving all the way down to Sorrento Back Beach, we found that because it was a weekday, the beach was practically empty. Absolutely perfect! Wandering along the beach, we found some nice rocks with a small cave that provided shelter from the breeze and a great posing area. Because the area we were at was totally empty, we decided to do some nude shots in the cave, and on the beach itself.

The cave shots was a two light setup with the key light being a 135cm Octa to camera left (fairly straight on) and an 18cm reflector to camera right to highlight the inside of the cave a little. The shot on the rocks in the outdoors was totally natural light, and the rest were just a single 135cm Octa typically to camera left.

Hopefully we’ll see Dora back in Australia soon and in front of my lens again!

Jackel’s motel room was tiny, but I was determined to make something work. With enough room for a bed, a bar fridge, a wardrobe, a table and not a lot else, this is what we came up with.

As technically you need permission to shoot in a motel, I was trying to keep things on the sly and not take gear that was too big in. As such, I was shooting with my 135cm Octa box in this tiny room. My 70cm Beauty Dish probably would have been a better choice, but hard to keep it stealth. In the end, it didn’t matter as the manager caught us and reluctantly let us shoot in the room.

The first shots you see here were about half way through the shoot in the hallways of the motel. Some funny looks from the clients staying there which we didn’t expect to be in the hallways at 11pm. After only a few shots, the manager came and told us off as we headed back to the room only after a few photos (apparently we were scaring the customers!).

From there, we decided to just try some candid stuff on the streets. So here we are with two extremely attractive girls, wearing not much at all, running around the streets of Brunswick with myself and my wife in tow. I only had my Nikon SB-600 flash on the camera (silly me forgot that I could use my off camera triggers with it), so shot some very candid style shots while we had a few onlookers.

So after that, it was back into the bedroom to try some stuff with both the girls on the bed. I think these implied nude shots are the best of the night and I have a lot of great response from them in the various areas that I display them. These style of shots are fantastic for showing off the girls tattoos.

Makeup again was supplied by my wife – Stacey D Makeup Artistry – and the tops used in the shots (where the girls are actually wearing them!) were supplied by Rachael Perks and Ashley O’Shea.

Originally the plan was to shoot outside Luna Park in St. Kilda, but unfortunately being a Wednesday night, the park was closed. We attempted to shoot there anyway, but the shots didn’t really turn out (yes, I have plans for next time I attempt something similar). Luckily The Palais Theater in St. Kilda is right next to Luna Park, and was closed for the night. Perfect little alcoves to shoot in.

Lighting wise, my trusty Elinchrom Ranger RX firing through a 135cm Octa box slightly to the right of camera. Not much room to get the lighting off to one side, so the lighting is fairly flat.

Jackel is awesome at posing so overall she drove the posing with me just adjusting occasionally as required.

Post processing wise, retouching is quite minimal as Jackel has phenomenally great skin (along with me having an awesome MUA working her magic).

So this one was extremely time limited. With only a week to go until Valentine’s Day, and only one day we both had free, Samii and I got down to shooting this. Props wise, this came about by me wandering around lunchtime on the day of the shoot picking up random items that I think would work. We ended up using about half of them along with something Samii picked up.

Lighting wise, this was a three light setup. My trusty Ranger RX pack with two action heads attached. To the left the key light was set up firing through a 70cm Beauty Dish. The second head had an 18cm reflector attached and was bounced off a wall for fill. The wall was painted black, so I’m not sure how much effect this ended up having on the final image. To camera right and behind Samii, I had a Yongnou YN-460II speedlight set up to act as a rim light. I originally had the second head from my Ranger back there, but unfortunately due to the fixed ratio of 2:1 of the lights, it was way too bright. If I could have moved the light back another couple of meters, it would have been fine. Such is the life of shooting indoors!

So once again, Samii proved what a fantastic model she is, how easy she is to work with and what an awesome person she is in general! Can’t wait for our next shoot!