A couple of weeks ago my best friend Rachel (whom you may recognize from the Raven shoot I did last year) approached me about doing some head shots for self-promotion. She's studying entertainment management and will likely be doing some pretty awesome things next year in film promotion. At the moment though she's works on some local music promotion and wanted some photos to reflect a bit of the "rocker" vibe. She offered me cupcakes, so of course I accepted, on the condition though that she let me turn the the shoot into a chance for me to experiment with a bit of fashion. She had no choice but to agree, so I got Alyssa (who's modeled for me quite a bit) in on the deal and we had an adventure. I really have no plans of going into any sort of fashion photography, but I really wanted do just play around with it a little bit and at least have some little bit of experience if I were ever to need to do at some point. Also photo adventures of any sort are usually fun.
As you can see, our first journey out we kept things classy down town. However once we got back to my apartment for a styling change we ended up going wild. Alyssa had a Restoration style dress with a corset and bustle on loan from the theatre department and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use it in a photo some how. For the most part I let the girls go to town with the styling and gave just a bit of creative input, such as the pseudo-eye-of-Horus on Rachel. For the locations we explored the train tracks behind my apartment and a small stone building in the park near by that the internet tells me was possibly a bear cage during an attempt to build a zoo about a century ago.
In all this shoot was great fun, and I actually ended up seeing a lot of improvement in everyone really. As with each time I shoot some one else I got more comfortable with directing my models, I played around with free-lensing a bit more and got some decent shots for once, and I managed to get shots in single frames instead of compulsively expanding every single shot. I was actually very proud of Rachel and how much more comfortable she got in front of the camera. The basis of our friendship lies in our incredible talent of struggling and being awkward, and let's just say that there are some pretty incredible out takes from the beginning of the adventure. But by the end she was working it like a pro and able to get into character. Which is good because she'll be the subject for a shot I'll be doing later today!
Awesome work!
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