Inspiration for creative photo shoots can arise from anywhere. We based the concept and styling for this shoot around Renee’s one off vintage dress, she wore to her graduation. The background was to be a tapestry to add that bit of vintage contrast. The light was to have depth and contrast to it. So I did a few tests using a mannequin. These tests obviously paid off, as the first photo in this post was featured on The Retouchist website in the new series How This was Lit.

Pratik Naik from Solstice Retouch, is regarded in the industry as one of the best retoucher’s and works for photographers around the world. Pratik is an educator, in fact I have his Creative Live retouching course and his dodge and burn process is what I use everyday. He also writes for Fstoppers. So it was a bit of an honor to be asked to share my lighting set up for this shoot.

I wanted to keep it simple a one light setup, that produces soft light with a aperture of f1.8. This gave the tapestry that blur that you see. This was not edited in. But to get that softness I did have to diffuse the light with a deflector as well as an extra diffusion layer inside the large Octa. The link has a behind the scenes photo as well as a description on my setup.

However the main idea was to head outside in this gorgeous CQ weather and do a outdoors shoot with natural light.

Lucia our model for the day. Has never had a photo shoot before. Absolutely blew us away with her ability to convey what we were asking if we even had to in front of the camera. A gem to work with and well we walked away with another idea for a shoot as we were reviewing the photos at the end of the shoot.

Renee Jeff’s the wonderful makeup artist, with the idea and the styling you always deliver. From a photographers point of view as well as a retoucher’s your makeup is so easy to edit. There is a fine line in photography makeup and of course it always depends on the style of the shoot, but Renee you truly understand this.