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.