Diary of a Photoshoot - Rozie
I’d been in touch with Rozie for a while on Instagram before we managed to put a shoot together. Chatting through some ideas beforehand, we settled on some high contrast, black and white images. Rozie has a small set up at her house, with some basic lights and a couple of cloth backdrops, so as it was our first shoot, we decided to shoot here.
Not being sure on what the lights Rozie had, were, I packed my own speedlites and modifiers and a couple of light stands. Arriving at Rozie’s, my first challenge was befriending her Staffordshire terrier. Luckily he’s a friendly brute and I didn’t have to protect my limbs.
In our pre-shoot planning, I had settled on a cyberpunk theme, creating a bit of an homage to the character of Pris from the 1982 classic, Blade Runner. Rozie had selected an outfit that definitely fitted the theme and styled herself and her make-up to fit this homage, without outright copying the character. I had hoped to create some bi-coloured lighting to simulate neon, but unfortunately my light set-up is quite basic and I didn’t have any gels or temperature adjustable heads to do this. I’ve since got myself some new lights, including a set of colour gels. So maybe I will revisit this idea in the future.
Seeing as the intention was to create black and white images, I set up a black cloth background, which would allow me to make the darker and black areas of Rozie disappear into that background and only let you see the areas that I wanted to light.
Early on, I wanted to photograph Rozie against a lit background, so set up the two lights that she had (simple, unadjustable constant lights with large, square modifiers). I wanted to over expose the background and then fill Rozie in with another flash head. But unfortunately the lights just simply weren’t powerful enough to blow out like I wanted. So I quickly scrapped that idea.
I instead opted for one speedlite, in a large octobox modifier (there’s definitely a pattern forming here if you’ve read any of my other posts like this). I often only use one light, as I do like to create large pools of shadow. Something that fit well for this shoot. The soft box was set up on a light stand and I adjusted it relative to Rozie’s height depending on whether she was standing or sitting, generally using the bottom of the modifier as a reference to line up with her eyes.
Rozie was a really fun model to shoot with, full of energy and wild facial expressions. We caught some great images of her roughing her hair and throwing it around. We also experimented with multi-shots, of Rozie throwing her head and hair back and forth. We managed to catch a few, but my older flashes struggled to keep up with my more modern camera’s frame rate. So some were captured in between the flash firing.
All in all, a great fun shoot and some images captured that I’m really happy with. I’m hoping to shoot with Rozie again in the future and create something interesting.
