Being just a nice quick beauty shoot, most of the time was spent in the makeup. For me, this was a lot about experimentation with beauty lighting, in particular what is known as clamshell lighting.

So the lighting was a 70cm Beauty Dish right in front of Silhouette’s face/head, and a 135cm Octa on the floor for fill. Shot at a very long focal length for the compression effect of the lens to give a flattering look. The grey background was my seamless white backdrop, but without any lighting on it, and due to the relative distances from light -> model and model -> background, it causes it to go grey.

We played around with feathers in the hair, but ultimately decided that it looked better without. Once shot in particular had the feathers in the hair, which I ended up removing in post processing later on.

So the awesome makeup, as always, provided by Stacey D Makeup Artistry

So just a basic studio setup with the 70cm Beauty Dish on the left and when using the white background, an 18cm reflector from above. When we were on the black background, this was turned off, and replaced with a small speedlight to act as a rim & hair light.

Shooting 8 different looks in an afternoon was crazy! 7 of them were the glamour ones, and we finished the day shooting some beauty using the same basic clamshell setup I had used before (Beauty Dish above, 135cm Octa on the floor).

Ellie was absolutely awesome to work with, and there will be plenty more shoots coming up, so watch this space!

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!

We spied a nice divider that could act like a cucoloris. From there I started to play around with hard light by using just an 18cm reflector on my light. Bingo, produced something that I reckon looks pretty cool.

A definite effect that I’m going to have to store away in my mind for future use.

On another note, the black and white photo below was used as Phottix’s photo of the week a few weeks back. Very chuffed at that one.

Sian got inspiration for a photoshoot from a catalog and wanted to shoot something similar for herself. I had a gear hire voucher that I won at a workshop earlier this year and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to use it (lucky I checked the voucher too, as it expired just after this shoot). So I went out and hired a second light for my battery pack along with a beauty dish. Having never used a regular beauty dish before (I’ve shot a couple of times using a Mola Setti which is quite different to a regular beauty dish) I was curious to see the results. Now I want a beauty dish of my own!

Lighting setup here was probably the most complex I’ve set up myself so far. Still relatively simple though. To the left of the camera and above the model sat the beauty dish. Coming in from the right of the camera and behind the model (at just above waist level) was another flash head with a 18cm reflector on it (no grid) pointed at the wall. Having started with that, the shadows were quite harsh and dark on the models left (camera right), so a large round hand held reflector was added (and held by Sian’s mum!) to fill in that shadow.

Pretty much all there was to it. From there, because we weren’t shooting any full length shots, everything was shot with a 70-200mm f/2.8 (at around f/8) which is quite a long lens for an indoor shoot (especially on a crop sensor camera like mine).

Because the lighting setup and makeup was so nice, not a lot of post processing went in to a lot of these. Just some blemish removal and light skin smoothing (could probably have got away without this too).

By the time I looked at these after the shoot, I was so impressed by the photos, and knew I’d have a hard time picking my favourites (and knew Sian would have a hard time too!).

Once again, a fantastic shoot with Sian and looking forward to the next time we shoot together.