Colour shoot

For this colour shoot, I wanted to use warm, golden tones. I asked Hana to be my model as she has beautiful skin and the perfect hair. She has long, thick hair with various golden tones running through it. This went perfectly with the make up I had in mind. I wanted to keep the make up natural but use lots of gold and highlighter to create radiant, glowing skin. I even highlighted her shoulders and collar bones and it came out so nicely on camera.

For her hair, I wanted it to be quite big and glamourous but at the same time I wanted it to be quite messy. For this, I curled and backcombed her hair until I got the look I was after. I love the contrast in texture between the glowing skin and messy hair.

For the lighting I chose to use two soft boxes. I altered the flash to make it brighter and more intense as I wanted the image to be quite soft, but I wanted it to be defined and I wanted to enhance the areas I had highlighted even further.

I was so nervous for this shoot as I have literally no experience with photographing people, there is so much to remember when it comes to setting up a studio and camera! But my skills have definitely come a long way since starting this project. I now have more of an understanding of how to correctly operate a camera and also what make up goes well with what lighting. The only thing that went slightly wrong with this shoot was that there were marks on the black backdrop. As I had booked out the studio I had no choice but to continue with this backdrop, but I was able to alter this in post production. I was pretty disappointed that we weren’t taught any editing skills in any of the post production lessons, but luckily a friend in my class was a bit of a photoshop wiz so she showed me what I needed to do to get rid of these marks. First, I altered the contrast and brightness to try and blacken the backdrop. This did work to an extent, but it began to change the colours of the face to much so I then used a paint tool to paint over these marks. The background looks slightly blurry, but it looks so much better than it did before. This sort of made softer than it would have been if I had used a harsh jet black background. I actually quite like the effect it gave.