Photo Breakdown: Gemmy in Braids
Posted under: Photo Breakdown is a new series which we will talk about how I arrive at the final photograph from the initial concept to the final processing technique.
We will be looking at one of my recent beauty photoshoots with Gemmy, a model from MAJOR. Here is one of the final photos from the series:
Conception:
Recently I’ve been focusing on hair and beauty shoots in studio. The cold New York weather has played a big factor in this focus. I wanted to do a beauty shoot just to play around with lighting. MAJOR sent Gemmy my way for my project, and after seeing Gemmy’s olive skin tone, I knew she would be perfect for this golden lighting idea I had in mind. I had wanted to work with blurred light bokeh for a shoot for a while now. I first saw it in a beauty shoot taken by Stephen Eastwood in the photo below:
And being the pre christmas season, I picked up some Christmas lights and headed for the studio.
Shooting Day:
Being a beauty shoot, the whole team wanted to have some fun and play off the golden glittery lighting theme of things. Rachel (MUA) had a series of shimmering makeup changes lined up for Gemmy while Mauricio (Hair) and I talked about the hair. I’ve always loved big hair, moving hair and curly hair, mostly because I don’t have much hair. At the time of the shoot, I was into big chunky braids as per the inspiration photo below:
Mauricio loved the idea as well and soon started a plan for braided looks for our various changes.
As Rachel and Mauricio started on everything I went about with my lighting setup.
Going off the inspiration lighting shot, I didn’t quite like the inspiration as it still shouted posed studio pic too much. The model was too well lit and the light bokeh acted more of a background. I wanted it to look like Gemmy was traversing a light forest. I wanted lights in front of her as well as behind her. Hence we end up with the lighting set up below:
There are four light sources, the Christmas lights in the foreground, Christmas lights in the background (you can just make out the stand in the back holding the lights. Then for the model, the key light is the AB800 with gridded beauty dish and then to add a little bit more ambient lighting and hair light, there is the big Softlighter II. The model is sandwiched between the two lights.
After the rough lights are set, I went out composing the shot. I typically shoot with an 85mm, but it is still has a rather wide field of view and causes a rather substantial size difference between the two bokeh lights as you can see below. Small bokeh are the lights in the back and the big lights are the bokeh of the lights right in front of the lens.
Thus I switched to shooting at 200mm which gives me a much more even bokeh sizes. In addition because of the bigger circle of confusion of the longer focal length, I get more blur (BONUS! :p). <you can read my review of the Tamron 70-200 here). Here are the lights taken at 200mm:
And also a little tip, as you can see this shoot is again boom heavy. I needed three booms to hold the Christmas lights as well as beautydish. So when in trouble, we DIY. I introduce the Bo’s Broom Boom.
Anyways, moving on to processing next.
Post Processing
Straight out of the camera, the photos already has a yellowish golden glow to the pictures, this is caused by a combination of factors. The Christmas lights are incandescent; the Alienbees are daylight balanced, so much warmer than other strobes; the make up on Gemmy olive skin and the golden highlights in the hair. But I still wanted a more even golden glow as inspired by the Natalia Vodianova photo below:
So with a little processing magic, we have made the colour more uniform and golden. Here are a few of the final results:
This was a wonderful shoot, very fun and we got fantastic results when everything just came together and our creative minds all clicked.
So there you go. A photograph from beginning to end and my thought process at each step along with way. If you have any questions, or if I left anything out, let me know in the comments and I’ll answer promptly. Thanks.
As this is a new blog series, any feedback would be appreciate it. Leave me a comment below, or if you have any questions or if there is anything I did not cover, feel free to drop me a line below and I would be happy to answer. In the meanwhile check out our other Lighting Of the Fortnight tutorials, Photo Breakdowns and past photoshoot recaps. Enjoy
Loving this post Bo, really interesting to see the full process of making an image. I’d like to know a bit more of how you tweaked the colours in post, but otherwise its great. More please!
alright cool, thanks charlie for the comment, I will probably do a blog post about the colour treatment in one of the retouching tip of the week things
a lot more to come trust me.
[...] UPDATE 2: Please check out my recent model shoot with the 70-200. Love the results [...]
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