Alice Alabaster

This shoot posed a whole new range of problems….. Miss Alabaster saw a photo of me taken with a smart-phone that had one of those retro style camera apps, e.g “Hipstermatic”, “Retro-camera” etc. And wanted to do a shoot where her styling fitted to an 80’s look and the final images looked like they were faded old photos.

 

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Any one who knows me also knows I’m not a photoshoot power user. In the studio I shoot tethered directly to Lightroom and use it for 85% of everything I do, but when I need a layer or 2 Photoshot is there…. Yes there are a lot of cross-processing and old photo look pre-sets but I wanted/needed more that that. My idea was to develop the raw files in Lightroom then jump to Photoshop  add a texture layer that has the affects I needed for the old photo look and then finish the editing off in lightroom.

 

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Finding enough textures wasn’t a problem, but finding enough high resolution textures wasn’t that easy. So although I wanted to give each photo an original look I had to re use a lot of the layers, but I think the results are pretty cool and hope that Miss Alabaster is happy with the results.

 

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I was so happy that Andreas put in so much effort to make it to the shoot it was cool catching up again after such a long time. To be honest I dint change the lighting a lot this time I wet up 2 bounce umbrellas in a clam shell type set up on a mobile light stand, this way the lighting style  remained constant put we could position it when and where we wanted it. The Key light (on top) was a Bowens Gemini 400ws set to f5.6 and the fill light (on bottom) was a Bowens Gemini 200ws set to f7.1.

 

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Although most of the shoot was with my A99, for a bit of fun I actually shot a lot of photos with a tiny Sony NEX C3 hooked up to a wireless trigger and using a Sigma 30mm 2.8, this camera was never designed much more that a steep up from point and shoot so I enjoyed the challenge of pushing it beyond its limits. P.S. if you though of Peggy Bundy, Debbey Harry, Desperately seeking Susan or any other 80’s icon then I think we achieved our goal

 

2 Responses to 'Alice Alabaster'

  1. Andreas says:

    Your results are great Scott! I like your ideas about the processing of the images. You put a lot of effort into it. The model Alice performed really good and her clothing fits perfect to the theme. I’m happy to have been there..

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