Seeking the World’s Soul

Fash­ion shoot with Szilvia

Small gallery from my fashion/ lin­gerie shoot with my Hun­gar­ian friend Szil­via. She’s study­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, but I’ve got to say she did awfully well in front of the lens.

Unfor­tu­nately she doesn’t want me post­ing the more risque pho­tos but we got some good fash­ion shots (and some of them were good, but as much as I’d like to show off…). I really like how con­trolled the col­ors are — a lim­ited but dra­matic palette.

The main light was a soft­box, and then I used a fill light with a semi-opaque dif­fuser gel.

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Lilly, an Eston­ian model work­ing in Berlin

I’ve been doing some more work with mod­els recently, mainly a lovely Eston­ian girl named Lilly. Unfor­tu­nately, I seemed to have for­got­ten all my (mea­gre) Eston­ian except for “Saku Tume, palun”, which is how one orders a dark Saku brand beer. Deli­cious stuff. I’m not sure if it’s really that good, actu­ally, or only that good in com­par­i­sion to Russia’s dark beers — Baltica Six is the only drink­able one, in my opin­ion, and I was pretty sick of that by the time I left…

Any­way, Lilly’s been lovely to work with, and some of these shots just smol­der. I’m think­ing they’d work well for book cov­ers on romance or vam­pire nov­els (funny how much over­lap there is there, isn’t it?). Any­way, the gallery is a mix of quite a few dif­fer­ent styles as we were work­ing on a port­fo­lio for her and that requires a model to show off her range. Take a look and enjoy.

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This is Karina, the first of the two mod­els I’ve been work­ing with and the rea­son I went out and bought stu­dio lights. We did a lot of play­ing around with props and poses — I love the golden age qual­ity of this image– sort of a vision of Queen Maeve of Con­naught via 1940s Hollywood.

Shot with one soft­box for light­ing on my usual Canon 350D, 18-55mm lens at 27mm. The matte black back­ground is wide rolls of crepe paper I taped to my book­shelf. I did a lit­tle bit of “paint­ing with light” on this one — above the basic image layer I cre­ated a trans­par­ent layer set on “soft light” and then dodged and burned that layer by paint­ing white, black, and golden yel­low at 8% trans­parency over the photo.

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I think my web­site has been hacked… the main site has dis­ap­peared and I can’t get into the Word­press admin area either. The other word­press blogs I’m host­ing for my fam­ily are messed up too. Arg, com­put­ers. I’ll deal with it tomor­row. Gallery still works, anyway.

Any­way, a bit of what I’ve been work­ing on:

First edits up here.

The model is Tamta, a Geor­gian girl who’s a refugee from Abk­hazia (and sort of a stu­dent though I’m not charg­ing her), who I’m help­ing develop a mod­el­ing port­fo­lio. She’s a treat to work with, though I had to do her makeup (just a touch of it) because all she has is col­ored chapstick.

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