I’d just finished taking some head shots in the studio and was heading to the car when I spotted this lady with her partner, CALL MY AGENT splashed across her sweat top dress. I love fashion and this simple top with its message printed so big across the front made me laugh inside, smile and think “So who is your agent?”.

Loaded up with gear it took me a moment to catch up with the couple. After a bit of conferring in a language I didn’t understand I got a yes.
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I popped along to Pro Beauty 2012 this afternoon at ExCel London primarily to meet up with fellow ‘tog Mark “Goose” Sayer. He’d made the four hour trip down south from Selby, North Yorkshire to work with the team on the Nouveau Beauty Group stand. They were there to promote the new line of eye lashes by Amy Childs. I was also looking for inspiration for some more off the wall make-up for studio shoots. While talking to Mark I spotted a lady with very shiny pink lips, see the fist of the shots below. While Mark did some more press shots with Amy I went for a wonder finding the lady in the second image below having a lip makeover. Applied to the lips and soaked off the paper with water they’re very much like the transfers so popular with children, only in much more vivid colours! These “lip wraps” were from trendynailwraps.co.uk

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During one of my fashion and portrait shoots the person being photographed may use a number of different outfits and each may be shot in a number of different ways. When sorting through the images to select the best I find it helps to group like shots into subfolders in the Lightroom catalogue.

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I’m still doing the final sort and edit on the images from the shoot with Holly and friends, but a few stood out for an early post. I’m loving the results from the beauty dish.

On a non-lighting side the biggest takeaway is that I need more flexible clamps to hold lighting mounts onto polls. Thankfully tarp fasteners and lots of electrical tape were to hand as an alternative!

Got one of these cards and wondering about the test shoots I spoke of? Chances are I’ve bumped into you in town, it may have been your face, hair, make-up, fashion style or everything combined that caught my attention.

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A massive thanks to Lydia and Kiran (MUA) for their help with the first two of the fashion lighting test shoots.

There were a few things to note from the shoot on a technical front:

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Thanks to my brilliant fellow photographer father and his eBay eagle eyes I’m now in possession of three Bowens lighting bowls. Two large, one small. All three with barn doors.

This weekend they’ll be transformed into beauty dishes ready for the first of the fashion lighting test shoots that are set to follow over the coming weeks. I’ve a growing list of lighting setups I want to try out with a mix of beauty dishes, softboxes, bare strobes, reflectors, barn doors, shoot through and bounce umbrellas, colour gels and backdrops.

The Bowens bowls will have a round removable ‘plug’ inserted with a hole sized to take either a studio or Canon 580EXII flash head. (read the rest of the post…)

This is in part a continuation of my Tips for New Models.

I’m a member of a number of photography and related sites that exist to bring photographers, models, makeup artists (MUA), studios, retouchers, stylists, etc together. There’s been a bit of a recurring pattern building in one of them prompting this post.

If you’re new to the industry don’t expect to be paid at first. You have to speculate to accumulate.

This applies equally to everyone involved, not just the models. Ask yourself “Who is asking for the images to be taken?“.

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I’m wanting to get back into the studio for an ALL WHITE shoot. White clothes, white backdrop.  With as many people as possible, men, women, any ages, previous experience not necessary. Possibly two photographers and multiple people in front of the lens at any time.

• Do you fancy being part of a group shoot?
• You can get to Bromley in Kent for a Sunday shoot? Date TBC
• Do you own enough white clothes, shoes, hats, accessories, etc to put together a head to toe white outfit?

If so I’d love to hear from you!

Just before Christmas my daughter created a collage of cover images from Canada’s “Fashion” Magazine and MMS’ed it to my iPhone.  It’s a great image with a lovely mix of colour with one of my favourites at the top of the stack – a pink dress. It got me doing my own Google search of magazine covers.  I was slightly surprised in the patterns I found.  Some used the very restricted colour schemes in order to give a consistent branding from month to month.  Others stuck to the magazine name at the top but were otherwise happy to change layout, fonts and colours to suit the cover image.

Looking at them all helped focus my mind on one thing – (read the rest of the post…)