This will be a short post, as I am including a video at the end that shows the course of the photo session. So I’ll focus on what you can’t see. Last summer, I wrote on my blog: “two unique models from Belarus caught my eye (…) during my trip, their stay in Thailand was coming to an end. Despite everything, I managed to photograph one of them – Nadia“. Several months passed and Kate – the second of the mentioned models, returned to Bangkok for a contract with A1 Models. It was before the COVID-19 issue began at the beginning of March 2019. A week later, the shit called COVID-19 hit the fan and Thailand started to function a bit differently, but that’s another post. I uploaded some photos right after the photo session on my Instagram, but a few have been waiting to be published until now. I regretted the departure of no model as much as Kate, so when she returned to Bangkok, it was clear that we had to do photos. However, before that happened, there were several-month contracts in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and visits to Europe.
As we know, in beauty sessions, makeup is the most important thing. The story of today’s makeup is quite simple: at Damian Black’s birthday party (the one responsible for numerous makeups from my beauty sessions) Kate and I approached a TV on which the video for GTA – Red Lips feat. Sam Bruno (Skrillex Remix) was playing:
The conversation was very short, but nothing more was needed:
Damian: I would create a makeup in this gold
Thomas: I would do a session with this makeup
Kate: I would pose in such a photo session
And everything was clear. It took a few days from the party to the session. In addition to the gold in her hair, the styling also included strong brightening of the skin with makeup, not post-production. It turned out like this:
The setup was standard, so in brief: a 70 cm/27 in beauty dish with a honeycomb grid, a 60 cm/23 in umbrella on the floor to fill the shadows, a lamp for a black background, and a rim light that was on very low power on selected photos, gently illuminating the gold. BTW. it was actually gold, just thin enough not to ruin photo session budgets ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I still have to finish it and there are a few completely different shots that are suitable for publication, so I will probably show something from this series in the future.
Update:
Not only beauty
The plan was to take only beauty shots, but we had plenty of time, so we also took other photos that I don’t know how to define. Something like tests, but without any test styling. So maybe fashion? But there weren’t many clothes in them, so they are just photos. Kate’s (also known as Kitty) head, still remained adorned with gold.
The problem was that no other styling was planned, but I wanted to try something with clothes. The first attempts were with a sports top, but it didn’t fit with such hair. I would have seen some outfits in the style of Katarzyna Konieczka, but my wardrobe is not a good place to find something similar. It ended up with Thai pants and mainly black and white shots, but colorful ones were also created in the end. However, first, a lot of BW shots:
In the backstage, you will see that in these non-beauty shots, the umbrella was still lying on the floor, but it was not in use. Instead, the sun reflector began to play a bigger role and was directed more towards the model than the background.
It’s a shame that I didn’t always take any additional shots during beauty sessions. Compared to the entire beauty session, it’s just a moment of extra work, and there are many more photos. And retouching 20 such shots is less work than one beauty shot…
Video backstage
That’s all for today, but I also have a short video. From the beginning of the session, my compact Canon was used from time to time as a backstage camera. I uploaded these clips to Quick and it gave me this video: