Monday, February 2, 2009

Let Them Eat Cake - preview

Life has been very busy lately. I finally got around to my first shoot of 2009 on Saturday. It's been nearly impossible getting anything done outside of work with all the OT I've been putting in. Which is why I barely had time to prepare for this last shoot.

The image is inspired by the "7 deadly sins". Basically all the props and/or Jacquis look and pose were supposed to sort of reflect that idea. The food stood for gluttony, jewels for greed and pride, broken glass (didn't show up enough) for wrath and envy, lingerie for lust, sloth was in Jacquis poses and the bubbles but also the general messiness........


My extremely messy studio during the shoot

The setup took me forever. For one the backdrop consisted of three staggered layers which was a pain in the ass to manage. I had one day to make sure I had all the stuff I wanted to use, set it all up and then shoot the damn thing. I got up early Saturday and was in the city by 8:30am to pick up the fur coat that my dear friend Rosalinda let me borrow. I made it up to my studio by 9:00am and got started with all the setup. Jacqui and Contessa showed up a little after 10am. We talked about hair and make up and they got started while I continued working on the set.

The first problem we ran into was that the gold make up was not showing up on Jacquis skin. I've worked with gold many times before and never saw this happen. I'm guessing it's because her skin tones are already on the warm side and a bit darker. I wanted the gold to pop way more. Contessa ended up putting a bright yellow base under the gold which seemed to work best. The hair and make up took 3 hours, I couldn't freaken believe it.... granted I wasn't even done with the setup anyway. Then I got these crazy long nails (~4 inches) that I wanted to use but they needed to be painted black first. I'm horrible at that stuff but did the best I could. The good thing about photography is, unless you're really up close you can get away with stuff being a tad messy. Anyway, we didn't start shooting until almost 3pm.... I was totally stressing out because I still had to set up the lighting and we were running out of time. Then I cut my finger pretty bad with scissors, it was bleeding profusely, thank god I had a heavy band aid stored in my studio. It was a rough start. The two other annoying things were the bubble machine running out of liquid and the damn nails kept on popping off. Every time that happened I had go and glue them back on. Although I worked really fast and definitely could have done better I was pretty happy with the overall shoot.


After we were done Jacqui was faced with the massive task of removing 10 layers of make up, not to mention those scary glued on nails.


I could tell she was panicking slightly when the nails didn't come off right away (which was rather ironic because they kept popping off during the shoot). We had to cut them short before drowning her fingers in glue removal..... oh the things models go through. While the shoot was crazy busy, we had a lot of fun as always. Jacqui is awesome!

2 comments:

Saigonradio said...

Dang Di, this looked like a lot of work. Your work pays off though.

tineMachine said...

Good photo talk today!

Can't wait to see the results...