Bad Girl

Avant Garde: Bad Girl

Bad Girl was taken in 2009 as part of an assign­ment with Saks Hair and Beauty. I had been com­mis­sioned to pro­duce prints for the branch in Dundee. The Bad Girl image is taken from one of the Avant-garde ses­sions and is my per­sonal choice from the ses­sion rather than a client selec­tion. I love to work with like minded cre­ative peo­ple such as make up artists and hair styl­ists, it gives a edge to your images that you wouldn’t get oth­er­wise.

The light­ing for the ses­sion was a sim­ple two light set up, let­ting the shad­ows take care of them­selves mostly I set up the main light which was the Elinchrom Midi-Octa which had both it’s inner and outer dif­fusers removed to cre­ate a stronger, more spec­u­lar light using the sil­ver inte­rior. I could do this because of the model hav­ing make up applied. Sil­ver gives a great punchy image but it should be used with care as it can bring out every sin­gle flaw in the skin due to the increased con­trast. The light was feath­ered for­ward to reduce any spill onto the back­ground, this also mean I had to be care­ful when com­pos­ing the image to get­ting any flare from the light hit­ting the lens. This light was set to f/10 and the light used was a Elinchrom 400BX.

The rim light was a Elinchrom 21cm reflec­tor with a 30° grid attached, this was placed about shoul­der height and aimed at the sub­jects head to give some sep­a­ra­tion from the back­ground. This was set to f/8, this light used for this was the Elinchrom 300RX as it gave me finer con­trol over the light output.

The final part was to fill in the shad­ows with a 1 meter white reflec­tor oppo­site the key light. This was adjusted so that it gave some sep­a­ra­tion to the model from the back­ground rather to become a fill light.

The cam­era was a Canon 30D with a 24-70L f/2.8 lens, it was set to man­ual at 1/125^th of a sec­ond and the aper­ture was f/10 to match the key light.

Related posts:

1. Sum­mer Dreams