I met Rachel Gisele last week as a result of a casting call to Model Mayhem. The call was to be for dramatic lighting, inspired by a tutorial I watched on Kelby training given by Frank Doordorf (“stay like that …“). She wanted to do some wild makeup. Without a makeup artist.
Alrighty then …
Actually, it turned out that Rachel did an outstanding job. Working by herself, she was able to do 2 very complicated looks for the shoot. It was much more elaborate than I expected and we got what I think are some great images.
The first theme was her idea. I produced a composite which hopefully does justice to her effort:
It’s funny because when she mentioned the makeup I had thrown out (in my mind) the idea of using dramatic lighting. I didn’t want to lose the makeup, so I shot against the cyc wall with bright white lighting. I ended up using a beauty dish (with sock); I had hoped to use the Elinchrom Deep Octa using the translucent deflector ( so it would act as a pseudo beauty dish) but I left the friggen’ thing home. O well. So I ended up using my classic beauty lighting setup: beauty dish boomed over, reflector under. This resulted in this image:
Nice, but not great. When we had taken our fill of shots against white, I decided to turn the background lights off such that the white cyc would go grey. I then decided to shoot using what I had originally envisioned: using just the inner baffle on the Deep Octa. Bingo! Gorgeous light! Poppy but not too specular:
Dramatic falloff but not harsh. The background went to a nice deep gray do to it being unlit and the fact that the closeness of the Octa led to some drastic falloff should any light make it back there. Later we did some shots moving to a black curtain with a kicker behind to add some more separation from the background, which also worked well.
After a beauty retouch I combined the 2 images. I did have to make a selection (I tried using multiply and darken blending modes, but the image was too soft). By extracting and duplicating the background image (the one shot on white), I was able to set it to screen mode and adjust the opacity of the layer to give the look you see.
More to come …