Hi Boys and Girls! I am back with a new “Story Behind the Picture” today it’s all about how did I get these images or better still how did I go about setting it up to get this end results?
I had done a shot like this a long time back and thought I would as they say “go back to the well” and change it up a bit. I started with the black swim cap and then set about making a back drop that would be cool to use not just use any old color background. I took a painters canvas backdrop and painted it an off cream color all over then set about making the black strips. I went back after it had dried and used sand paper to rub some of the black off to give the appearance that it had aged. I use water as I was rubbing the black so it would come off in only some places and be easy to work with in the removal of the paint. Now just having a model sitting in front of the backdrop was OK but I wanted to take it up a notch by using a bubble machine to add to what I thought would make it be come a fun look.
This was also going to be the first time I was to use some new LED’s to light my set for still photography so I had to work out what my exposure was going to be with the bubbles flying about so my first thought was I need a quick shutter speed & I would also need a shallow depth of field to make the subject stand out. This was all going to be found out on the set during shooting so I needed a model who was a professional for this to work in my testing of the LED lights.
My pick was Playmate Irina Voronina she has a super looking face that would do well with the swim cap on. So we set up for a head shot and I had one light (Amaran Halo 300w) face on with a silver card under her face to bounce the light up into her face to help soften the shadows from the one light.
I also used a LED (Roto-Light NEO 3) color light on the backdrop which had a cyan color set to give a bump to the backdrop color which is hard to tell.
I had my makeup artist use another bubble gun to shoot more bubbles in front of the models face and I also needed to have the cap look a bit wet so we use some ArmorAll to give a sheen to the black rubber swim cap. I shot the images at 125sec to catch the moving bubbles and this let me use an f stop of 5. with my ISO of 250
After the shoot I took some of the images into photoshop® and bought the color down to have a washed out look and some of the other images into I made just BW. I think that if I had kept all the color in the images they would have looked just like every one’s else’s digital images. Today most of what we see is all looking the same. So why not come up with a different color look as it’s like using a different film back in the day.