In December, I was lucky enough to work with a brilliant team of amazing women on a photoshoot. Jess Melia of Valkyrie Models was my fabulous model and Olivia Hack worked as our hair and makeup artist,
This photoshoot was inspired by a variety of things. The main inspiration was your typical idea of a Vogue photoshoot. Whenever I think of looking through Vogue magazine, or scrolling through their images online, I always think of their use of bright- but muted- colours. As well, the striking poses and facial expressions which exude high fashion. Therefore, with all of these things in mind, as soon as I had finalised the idea for this shoot, I knew that it was the colours in particular that I wanted to experiment with the most, as well as the posing.
Colourful Outfit
Once I was armed with the idea of utilising bright colours, I knew I wanted the bright colours to come from the model and what she was wearing- not the backdrop. I sometimes find that using bright backdrop colours can be overpowering. Therefore, I thought this bright pink mesh blouse from Monki was the perfect solution.
I decided to pair this blouse with a patterned sleeveless dress and add extra mesh drapes for even more texture. Adding these drapes helped give Jess something to interact with in the shoot and helped us to create some powerful images thanks to her amazing modelling skills. Some may think that these were over the top, but there is nothing more that I love than editorial photoshoots with crazy, weird and wonderful outfits. For me, as long as it looks good, I will use it in my shot!
The bright pinks were the perfect backdrop for the makeup looks as created by Liv. The bright pink and purple eyeshadow she used directly matched the colours of the clothing and created a beautiful cohesive, single hue look. At the beginning of the shoot we started with a simple winged eyeliner and added to this throughout with then resulted in a fierce cat-eye which perfectly juxtaposed the softness of the images.
Lighting Setup
This Is How I Lit These Photographs:
I began with a beauty dish placed directly in front of my model. Of course, I discovered this was too harsh for the aesthetic I was aiming to achieve. Despite this, I I was keen to create some contrast in the images with the shadows, so I kept this beauty dish and then added a second light source behind it.
The second light source in these images was the most important. I used a large octabox to provide me with a beautiful cloak of soft light over the top of the small punch of contrast given by the beauty dish.
When I wanted to fill in some of the shadows, I used the white side of a bookend reflector. This was helpful for controlling the exact amount of shadows I wanted to include.