'Alternative' studio fashion, lingerie and portraiture

Recently I was in touch with a model known as Pleasure0fsin, she was travelling to Leeds and I jumped at the change to arrange a shoot. I'm still very new to booking models and find it incredibly nerve wracking to say the least! I absolutely love her 'alternative' look (hair and styling seen on her portfolio) and she has such a beautiful face I just had to photograph her!

For this shoot, I was feeling especially prepared - I had been into the studio a few weeks before and done some self-portraits to experiment with the lighting set-ups and thought I was all ready to go. I usually use the studio on evenings but due to both our availability I just so happened to book it on a weekend (I thought it would have the added benefit of being particularly quiet). I headed over to the studio an hour or so before the model was due to arrive so I could get everything set up and ready to go, but here I encountered problem number 1 of the day - My building access card had stopped working!

A few panicked text messages and thankfully a friend was around to come and let me in, panic over but not quite as much preparation time as I'd have liked. Then came issue number 2 - I had been into the office the day before to borrow all the equipment I needed (on-camera triggers etc.) but suddenly realised the part that plugs into the back of the lights was missing so I had no way to fire any of the lights! (Just picture the fluster I was in searching high and low as no-one else was in the building again until Monday - Model now just 10 minutes away). Nowhere to be seen I had to do a bit of quick thinking - thankfully I knew there were some LED continuous lights in the other studio (though i'd never used them before)! I managed to set up the lights as I had planned to do originally just in time to greet Pleasure0fSin (who happened to be absolutely lovely!). A few quick tests showed that (as I should have expected) the lighting looked nothing like I planned and the continuous lights were nowhere near as powerful as I required.

Lots of faffing around later (my model was so patient with me) I finally began to get something I could work with! We tried various outfits and I played with different light set-ups to capture different 'moods'.

It then occurred to me that behind the curtain is a huge window with loads of natural light that I was far too flustered to even think about before! We experimented with this both against the main backdrop and also in various other places around the studio. I had never quite understood 'flare' in images before but it just so happened that the sun was coming in exactly where I needed to stand and it gave me the opportunity to play around with it (much more work needed here!!) I also enjoyed using varying depths of field and playing with different lenses, though I always seem to go back to my 50mm.

The model was absolutely great to work with, so patient (which I can't thank her for enough!) and her makeup was so flawless I really had very little post-processing to do! I was very impressed with her efforts and can highly recommend her to other photographers!