Here’s another shoot with the fabulous Adreena Angela, mostly experimenting with transparent materials & natural light. The organza around the head has the happy bonus of softening the light hitting her face, & her tattoos always give an edge to the photos. The shot of her laughing is one of my favourites, but was unplanned.
Shot at my studio in Shadwell, Central London. Hair & make-up by Adreena.
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, I considered being a wedding photographer. When I first started taking photos, as I hadn’t planned to do it for a living, I tried my hand at everything to see what I was most drawn to. Weddings can be great fun, everyone’s happy & dressed up, so lots of lovely natural expressions & great captured moments. I also love getting all the details of a wedding, such as the bride’s shoes, the table settings, flowers, details on the dress etc. On the down side, it’s a really long day, & you’re taking the most important photos of people’s lives, that will be up on show in the homes of them & their family, so it’s a huge responsibility. Add to that the fact that you have limited time for posed shots, and you need to work outdoors with whatever the weather decides to throw at you & it’s one of the trickiest types of photography to get right.
After a few years away from weddings I took a camera to the wedding of one of my make-up artists last year. It was a vintage theme, so everyone looked amazing, & in a fabulous venue, Porchester Hall in Notting Hill. Although I wasn’t the wedding photographer, I really enjoyed taking photos all day, & the photos came out really well. Having posted those, I’ve been offered a couple of very exciting paid weddings this year, so I’ve decided to be available for the occasional one if it feels right.
Here’s a gallery of some of my favourite shots from previous weddings.
I always like to find time for some testing each month; my paid work doesn’t allow me to try out new ideas too much, & I feel the need to keep creative.
These shots are from a fashion test with Chloe T from Oxygen, shot at my place in Central London. Shooting fashion is quite different for me as I’ve spent most of my photography life exploring the interplay of light on skin, & lighting clothes is a very different discipline.
It’s really important when fashion tests to have decent clothes, & I was lucky enough to get Jakki Degg to come & style the shoot. She’s really creative & has a fantastic collection of outfits, I’d highly recommend her to anyone looking for a stylist.
Make-up by Tamash Sharkan
It’s always fun to shoot with young Miss Buckitt; she’s full of creative ideas & very bendy, which is always a winning combination 
Plus she lives near me in East London so is handy.
The plan for this shoot was to shoot something involving wax, play around with gels ( I keep my place neutrally coloured so as to match what the model brings, but it’s nice to change things round), & to see just how close Charlie’s legs could get to her ears.
This shot involved melting candles directly onto Charlie’s chin (ouch!) It was her idea, I don’t generally go round inflicting pain on my models.
For the gel shots, I lit the room with a pink gel , & used two striplight soft boxes on Charlie, with egg crates over then to control the light spill. The overall effect seems strangely flamingo-like.
This was probably the bendiest of all shots. She doesn’t train or anything, she’s naturally this way.
Attempting to look all sweet & innocent. Almost pulling it off, the lack of clothes probably doesn’t help.
This is a shot from further back so you can get an idea of the lighting set-up.
And finally, this is George, who helps me set up the lights, & saves the model from having to stand there while I fiddle about trying to get the right effect.
I recently booked a hotel room for a couple of shoots; I spend the majority of my time shooting from my home studio so it’s always nice to get out & try glamourous new locations. Simona’s an outstanding model, some of my favourite fashion shots from my own work have been with her. With someone who really knows what they’re doing I can focus on the lighting, which is important as it’s kind of the point of the test.
The trick to getting great indoors shots is to balance the studio lights with the ambient light in the room. This can be difficult as studio flashes are far more powerful, even at their lowest setting, than a bedside lamp, To get round this, you can either use a slower shutter speed to let more light in, cover the flash with something to reduce its power, or, as I did here, just use the modelling lights. It’s not the most elegant solution of the three, but it does have the advantage of balancing the colours, as the lamp is much more orange than the flash, but the same colour as the modelling light.
The same technique was used here. Hotels are usually pretty good at lighting their best rooms, so I find it an advantage to capture the light as it’s meant to be seen.
For this shot I used ring flash. I’ve never been a fan of it, but it does look pretty cool with fashion models. For me it only really works when the model is right up against the background, as I don’t like the way it lights furniture (this is why I’m not keen on using it much).
As there’s no ambient lighting in this shot, I fired the flashes for a change. I’ve added some vignetting as it focusses the attention on Simona & breaks up the plain wall a little.
Finally, if there’s window light, I’ll always try and get a natural light shot. This room had a small window with hardly any light, so the best way to use it was to have her facing the window. I wanted to use the desk furniture, and by shooting from behind & into the mirror I managed to make the most of the natural light & also get the desk in. Shooting into mirrors brings its own problems, not least photos of me in the reflection, but this small mirror made it easy to fill the picture with the model so you don’t see too much of the room. Generally six inches out of shot lies a big pile of lights, camera bags, make-up artists, & various other messes, making it hard to find space for a shot without having to worry about what’s being relfected behind you as well!
I had a request on Model Mayhem from Ember, who wanted to shoot using gels. As it turned out, while she was looking through my portfolio, she recognised the church opposite my flat as her boyfriend lives there & she’d actually seen me shooting in the park. I’d seen flashes going off from that apartment & wondered if there was a studio. Small world.
It was quite a technical challenge balancing the light from the lamp behind, the gelled lights, & the lighting on Ember. This is George, who I use to get the lighting roughly right before bringing the model in.
Once I have the lighting roughly balanced, I’ll bring the model in & fiddle about some more. As Ember has a nicely toned body, I used striplights from the sides to accentuate the muscle tone (doesn’t work so well on George).
I think this type of lighting ideally suits nude, as the underwear breaks up the lines of the body.
Here’s a couple of behind the scenes shots to give you a idea of what I was trying with the lighting.
…and some other lighting options, including gels on Ember
Finally, just for fun I brought the glitterball in to see if I could get two completely different colours, which I managed, but I’m not sure if the results actually make a photo worth looking at!
& one of George to finish as I’m sure you’re bored of all those naked women. Well done to Ember as George can be quite a diva to pose with
Jess is one of the most creative models I’ve worked with, which always makes for a great day’s shooting. It’s hard not to pick up the energy of the people around you, so if a model understands the process and is happy to be patient while you’re fiddling about trying to get a great photo, it really helps.
Things I learned from this shoot :-
1) Paying homage to great photos, then putting your own twist on it, helps you get something different (we used a Kate Moss pic with a spiky helmet)
2) Oiling a model up & spraying water on her makes the skin look great in photos. No I don’t need anyone to do it for me
3) Lens flare can look cool if used right.
Happy New Year! I hope that Santa was kind to you & that your plans for 2013 are going well. I’ve been beavering away over the festive period to start the year with a bang. It’s true enough that your life always starts today, & you don’t have to wait for a new year to make changes, but I do find that the combination of being relatively quiet (in December everyone’s saving up for Christmas, in early January everyone’s fat & poor after too much turkey!) & the year ending, gives me an excellent chance to take stock & look at where I want to be in a year’s time.
Anyway, one of my resolutions is to be more consistent with my blogging, so here’s the first of many. Ashlea was recommended to me by another model I’d shot, so I didn’t know too much about her before she arrived, so her spectacular legs were a very pleasant surprise I enjoy shooting tall girls, & find myself able to do more with them photographically, but it does present a side problem of them being too tall to fit on some of my furniture! Clearly I’m going to need a bigger house.
This is also the first shoot to feature this lovely chest of drawers & wardrobe. Make the most of them, I only have them for a short while!
On the odd occasion that we do get a rare sunny day, there’s a beautiful park behind my house, so I’m always keen to run out & take a few shots whenever the weather allows, & whenever the model has some clothing other than underwear Naturally lit outdoor shots are after all where I started, on the beaches of Gran Canaria back in 2005.
My local park has a great combination of grass & meadow, some really old brick walls, great trees, an amazing 300 year old church, & plenty of squirrels (not pictured, I’m still trying to train them to pose). It’s perfect in the early morning, but gets a bit busy in the afternoon, & we inevitably attract an audience of teenagers, which gets somewhat distracting. Why is it that strangers will happily ignore you completely on the tube but feel free to interrupt a photoshoot? Perhaps I should try shooting on the Central Line
Anyway, here’s Josie. Redheads are always my favourite & she was great to work with, we’re currently setting up an indoor shoot to suit the current weather.
I’m always interested in shooting edgy girls, & Scarlet was a great example of that. She has a great ability to convey a mood by looking away from the camera, & then when she does bring her eyes back to you, it’s really fierce.
My favourite of these are the ones in the lift. I had to use black & white, as the colours in the space around the lift are pretty bad (blue carpet, yellow walls!) but I think it helps with the mood of the shots, which is also why I’ve added some grain.
In all these shots bar the one in the window, Scarlet is lit with a 6 foot soft box. I’m using it more & more as it gives a really great light if you get it close enough (you can actually see it reflected in the mirror in one shot, it’s that close!)
