Various portraits with Zee Zee shot in my home studio

Hey everyone!

Recently Zee Zee wandered into my home studio for a photoshoot. I wanted to try and capture some artistic portraits, and with her experience as a dancer, some shots of her in motion, capturing multiple elements of a dance move in a single exposure by strobing the flash.

We also wanted to create some work in collaboration with a make up artist, Kayla. Thus, this was a shoot completed in two parts.

We started off by doingsome photography using coloured gels, where a cellophane like material is placed between the light and the person being photographed, which gives the portrait a different colour. You see this a lot in marketing photography for fitness products and to create a different, otherwordly mood or atmosphere in the image.

The real challenge with gel photography is picking the right colours,and ensuring that light is sculpted well on the model, otherwise you can run into problems like oversaturated light, or even worse, making the person look completely un-natural!

These images were lit with a combination of a GODOX AD600BM and a GODOXAD200 - both awesome lights.

I then captured some more portraits using more conventional lighting techniques, with some classical portrait lighting using a single light and a reflector. This included a couple of full length portraits.

We then had make up artist, Kayla come in and do her thing, transforming Zee Zee's look into something else. I captured a few shots show off the make up in fine detail, as Kayla did an incredible job!

These images were all shot with a single light, with a really shallow depth of field. I used a combination of my 85 f/1.8 and 35 f/1.8 to capture this shots. The 35mm lens is a new addition to my stable, and I'm really pleased with the level of detail it is able to resolve, and in particular, the natural looking perspective it gives to the images.

Retouching on these images was very light, and no real work was required - Zee Zee and Kayla are clearly professionals who know what they're doing!

Finally, it was time to reset my flash and lighting to capture the last set of images - where I wanted to have a real sense of motion, and capture movement in a single frame. These sorts of images are quite popular if you look for photographs of dancers - as it captures the motions in a single frame.

In order to achieve this, every light was turned off, the camera was set to a four second shutter speed, and the flash was set to strobe once every four seconds. This ratio was played with throughout, and the shot below is the best outcome that I managed to generate from a single exposure. The image below is not a composite!. It is a single frame. All done in camera, apart from the darkening of the background as a fair bit of light flooded the bakdrop, making creases evident.

This sort of movement is something I want to capture a lot more of - as it is really fun to experiment with movement overtime in order to see what the camera sees when the light strobes. It is capturing an extended slice of time, which is something that has always fascinated me about photography, and now is no exception. A high F-Stop (aroound F8) was used, along with a strict set of "boundaries" taped out on the floor, in conjunction with manual focus to ensure each "exposure" on the single frame would be in focus, or close to in focus.

There's a bit of luck involved with these sorts of shots, as is shown by the next image, which I regard as... less successful.

Finally, we had a final look to complete, which was using a combination of Chiffon and some standard sort of lighting to freeze motion. These shots were generated from sheer exhaustion as we were all keen to obtain pizza by this point. I think they came out well!

What do you think of this set of images? I'm happy to answer any and all questions!