Pinup - A new obsession?

So a couple weeks after I did the zombie pinup thing that was mentioned in the last post, my sister's friend called me. This worried me, honestly, because you can never know what Dani is up to. Turns out she was calling on behalf of a friend - Becka - who was starting out modeling and was very interested in pinup. Of course I agreed to shoot her!

Quick description of Becka - punk/goth kinda chick with black hair, multiple tattoos and a lip piercing. She's 18 and a senior at a Catholic high school. I adored her instantly.

I set up the black backdrop in the kitchen (my ghetto studio is super ghetto but totally works) with the Alien Bee and softbox and once we got Becka's hair properly fauxhawked did a couple test shots. I also made Kevin, who was playing assistant, go get a bar chair because it worked beautifully with the outfit we'd come up with. My lovely model wasn't too experienced, so I was giving her some posing tips and she seemed to really take this elegant one:



Yeah, I adore that portrait. It's so....classic, but modernly so. Anyway, outside for a smoke break for everyone but me. Now, outside is my back porch is the roof of a bowling alley. And I have this thing for cigarettes.  I may not smoke them, but I love the way they look and I love my roof, so of course we had to do a couple shots with the cig and some with the beautiful sky we had that day as background.

Went back inside, changed our backdrop to white and her outfit, and started some more pin-up like pin-ups!  I had printed out a bunch of pose examples, so we studied those and got to work.  The softbox is amazing for this sort of thing, let me just say.  I am SO glad I bought it.  Going to get another at some point!  Anyway, she had this cute leopard print outfit she wanted, so we did THE pin-up pose, as I call it, with that and then ended up with a sporty sort of look.  Pointing the Alien Bee down on a sitting/laying subject has such amazing light, it's just all around and lovely.

 

I really do need a new white backdrop though, as mine is paper and dirty and, after the zombie shoot, covered in fake blood.  It takes a ridiculous amount of post to make it look clean.  I'll probably just end up cutting it, as it IS paper after all and it's a lot longer than I need.  But here's to show just how much I have to do, editing-wise, on these.  Not even just the paper, but we had a terrible bright spot coming in from my kitchen window that was not co-operating at being overpowered - every time I upped the power on my flash and strobe it would blow out the image and seeing as I was already on ISO 100 at somewhere around f22...  Photoshop is my friend indeed.