Recap of last month

I know, I know, I haven't updated in a ridiculous amount of time.  Like, 6 weeks.  Ooops.  So let's recap!!

Mid-February, I photographed Danielle and Jason's wedding.  Beautiful wedding and you should see this dress!!!  Oh wait, you can.

Gorgeous, right?!

Almost immediately after that I got the flu, so was out of commission for about a week.  It was terrible, but I'm better now and ready to shoot!

Got a new Alien Bee B400 (it's pink like my hair!) in at the beginning of last month, so that's been crazy exciting.  So far I've taken pictures of my brother, myself, Trix, and my friend Artie's insanely adorable little girl Rowan.  Gotta say, February was (aside from that whole flu misery) a pretty good month!

Balloons and Cigars

I guess the title of this should actually be "cigars and balloons" because the cigars came first.  My dad got shipment of cigars in on Friday, no, Thursday, on Thursday, and that same day I got in an infrared trigger for my strobe, which is great because I'd just been using my speedlight to trigger it before.  The trigger isn't as nice as, say, Pocket Wizards, but it more or less does the job.  A little testy, but what can you expect for $17 on Amazon?  I love Amazon, by the way, and tend to want to type it as Amazoning.  Like, amazing, you know?  Anyway.  These pretty much go in order, because first he's smelling the delicious new cigar, then he's lighting it, then he's smoking it.  The Alien Bee was off to the right of the desk (if facing it),  just with the silver dish on it.  No umbrella (-ella -ella) or softbox.  I moved around to the left to get more dramatic light.  The second image, where Dad is lighting the cigar, is a 1/4 of a second exposure to get the flame from the lighter, as compared to the other photos, where the exposure is more around 1/100 of a second.

Then, yesterday, my sister Christy (she was my zombie pinup in February and the victim in my recent vampire shoot) and I were working at the bowling alley and a birthday party left a bunch of balloons!!  I was supposed to be getting ready to go my ex-boyfriend Cryss's (we're trying to maybe work things out.  Again.) but I ended up being a little late because, well, pictures had to be taken.  We took a couple indoors so I could play with my infrared trigger and strobe.  The first shot of these is the only edited one of the set.

Then we went out to the roof, because, c'mon, balloons and open air?  Soulmates.  No flashes for these shots, just sunlight.  She did a lot of jumping around (good leg workout!) because we wanted it to like she was flying.  The first is one of my favorites because she looks so joyous and the pose is awesome.  I might edit the tree out though.  Opinions?  Christy loves the second shot, because she looks like she's landing.  Kind of Mary Poppins-esque, I think!  For the last, she was standing on the very very edge of the roof (the white raised bit that can be seen in the background of the second one) which made me a bit nervous, but it looks great!  Fly, little sister, fly!!

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.

Alien Bees and Zombie Pinups

About a week and a half ago I finally achieved a major photographic goal of mine and purchased an Alien Bee B800 along with a softbox, umbrella, and heavy duty light stand. It's great stuff - the softbox is SO easy to assemble and light works wonderfully. Such a great purchase. I did some test portraits for the first couple days, using my sister and friend Erich as models. This is one of my best shots of Erich. There are more test shots to be seen on my (fairly new) facebook page -
http://www.facebook.com/elenadeephoto




Over the past month, my buddy Kevin and I have been practicing our zombie makeup, which finally was used for a zombie pinup session featuring my sister/model Christiana yesterday. Kevin and I made wounds using liquid latex, while my fellow photographer Cassandra Grzybowski helped apply bruise makeup. She did a beautiful job on the face and shoulders, I must say. And Kevin's knee wound and the one I did on her thigh look especially decayed in the classic legs crossed pinup pose, as you can see below. I've never tried pinup before, but have wanted to for awhile. Personally, I think they turned out quite well for a first attempt. Christy is a great model, and if anyone is interested in shooting her, she can be reached on Model Mayhem - http://www.modelmayhem.com/christianacdd