I did a shoot a couple of weeks ago for my good friend Lissa Hill, who is launching her brand new line of motorcycle leathers. Lissa makes beautiful custom motorcycle and fashion leather garments, and it was great fun to find different ways to showcase them. Lissa’s made a few leather jackets for me, and I can vouch for how great it feels to have something custom made for you that fits your sense of style and your body like a glove.
We hired Sarah to model the clothes, and she did a great job. Sarah was a pleasure to work with. She’s an expressive model who is able to quickly find a pose and expression to match what needs to be communicated in the photos. Hair and makeup artist Sue Upton created a number of different looks for Sarah, so the photos would have some variety.
Sue Upton and Lissa Hill getting Sarah ready for the first photo of the day.
I went with high contrast lighting to emphasize the high contrast look of Lissa’s designs. I set up a single Alien Bees B800 strobe above Sarah on a boom, with only the standard silver reflector and nothing to diffuse it. I positioned Sarah close to the white background so she’d cast some interesting shadows.
A few months ago, Laura Hollick and I worked with talented makeup artist and painter Sue Upton to create a photo of Laura taking off with her red bird spirit. In the shoot, we merged Sue’s painting and body-painting skills with Laura’s vision and my photography. It’s always fun to collaborate closely with a team of people who each contribute their own unique skills. I end up learning a lot about what is possible, even when it comes to my own medium of photography.
The process began with some preliminary snapshots to experiment with the poses and the positioning of the painting. Sue then sketched a few different bird designs onto these printouts to get a rough idea of how it was going to look. We wanted to add a branch so that there would be some context to the pose, and so it wouldn’t look like Laura was just floating there in mid-air, but rather stepping off into the unknown with the red bird as her guide. In the sketches below, you can see that Sue used white correction fluid to highlight the best image so that it could be most easily projected onto the backdrop for tracing and then painting.
Painting Laura and the backdrop took hours of meticulous work. The shoot was spread out over two days because we actually shot two completely different poses. Each of the poses required different background and body painting. It was a test of patience and stamina for everyone involved.
The actual photography was quite simple. I wanted good depth of field and even, soft lighting with few shadows. Two Alien Bees B800 flash units set close to their maximum power, modified with brolly boxes provided this bright and diffuse light. I also wanted to stand fairly far back and shoot with as long a focal length as was possible. Laura’s big studio gave me lots of room to do this. All of these techniques were designed to flatten the image so that it would blend Laura with her surroundings as seamlessly as possible.
Here are the final images. What do you think?
Please also read Laura’s fascinating blog post about this shoot.
We’ve been busy preparing for the Birth Your Dreams Exhibition, and everything is going really well. We finished shooting the final image for the exhibition last weekend, and were treated to perfect weather for that shot. All of our prints arrived on time too. Today, we purchased the materials for framing all the prints. It’s going to look amazing when it’s all done.
We’re going to have some nice publicity too. View Magazine is putting us on the cover of the issue that comes out on August 6, just a day before the exhibition opens. Laura and I collaborated with the fantastic hair and makeup artist Sue Upton to create a really fun image for that cover that ties into some of the themes of Birth Your Dreams. Here’s a video we made during that photoshoot.
