My friend Emma Robertson is a fabulous hair and makeup artist who also does a bit of modelling, and I’d been meaning to tee up a photoshoot with her for ages. I finally managed to get organised to tee something up, and I did a shoot with her a couple days ago.
I asked Emma to do some outlandish glamour/theatrical makeup. I’d seen her in a performance wearing rhinestone jewels on her lips and I specifically wanted the bejewelled lips with some accompanying colourful eye makeup in a glam/jazz/cabaret/theatrical style. I knew I was going to be shooting mostly against a blue background so I asked Emma to keep the makeup colours in the warm tones, for contrast.
Why the blue background? That’s a good question. Originally I was just going to shoot against black but I came across a Karl Giant image online and was totally inspired by the background colour (BTW the image is of cabaret singer Meow Meow, who I’ve seen live before and if you haven’t seen her perform, well, I highly recommend it).
The rhinestones, by the way, are actually sold in cheap dollar stores as ‘cellphone jewels’ – you are supposed to stick them on your cellphone to bling it up, but they they make fab makeup accessories.
We ended up with a sort of 1970s disco glam look, which I was totally digging.
The above photos (apart from the first one) were done with a gridded spot and softbox on the model (both high and directly behind the photographer). A separate gridded spot on the background gave the blue vignette. Two bare speedlights positioned behind the model at 45 degree angles acted as hair lights and provided rim lighting.
Next we changed up the lighting setup. One of my all-time favourite photographers is George Hurrell. The man was a complete lighting genius. His work completely blows my mind. I think if I practice studio lighting every day for the rest of my life I might be lucky to get half as good as Hurrell was. Just do a Google Image search on his name if you are not familiar with his work. It’s achingly beautiful.
Anyway – I wasn’t out to try to recreate a Hurrell portrait, but I just wanted to use some of my favourite pics of his (like this one of actress Loretta Young) as inspiration to try some harsher top-lighting. A studio strobe mounted on a boom provided a direct top light. Bare and/or gridded was a bit harsh, but with a small umbrella I managed to get the sort of illumination I was after. I put Emma in a floor lenth faux-fur trimmed velvet ‘Cruella De Ville’ style coat I own.
I love the mix of the classic lighting with Emma’s crazy-weird makeup. I really like the photo below on the right – she looks like a spooky broken-down doll.
Finally, Emma asked if we could do some photos of her in a corset she had brought with her. She said she hardly gets a chance to wear it anywhere and thought it would be fun to do some pictures. For these photos I turned off the background light and Emma was lit with 2 umbrellas either side (one slightly stronger than the other), plus a gridded spot set up low to illuminate just the corset, and a softbox up high and feathered so it was just lighting her face.
I had a ton of fun shooting the photos and it also gave me a chance to play around with the new Bowens lights I’ve got, courtesy of Diederik over at Lightworx. As always I was ably assisted by my amazing lighting assistant Brence Coghill, who did a stellar job of wrangling the lights and helping me pretend I was channelling George Hurrell 
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