liquid visions…

I shot for the latest cycle of Britain’s Next Top Model earlier this year. The show is hosted by Elle MacPherson this season.

I shot a very simple beauty shoot for Revlon at their headquarters – Revlon House – in Camden. At this point the competition was down to 6 girls: Alisha, Amelia, Charlotte, Joy, Olivia and Tiffany.

Shooting for TV is always a bit surreal and somewhat detached from the normal shoots that I conduct. When i normally shoot beauty, I spend some time talking to the model beforehand to build rapport and trust and ensure them I have their best interests at heart. We work as a team with hair and makeup and we play music to create an atmosphere, chat and there is no-one extra on set who doesn’t need to be there.

When you’re shooting for TV, you have 10 minutes with a model you have had zero contact with and who for the most part have never done a beauty shoot before in their life. The girls have very little time to interpret the brief, there is no music playing and there is a team of about 20-25 people, assistants, tv crew, the people from Revlon watching you and the model as you work in near silence. It feels a bit unreal and it must be worse for the girls.

So under these conditions I don’t expect miracles from the girls but when someone shines through it is a breath of fresh air. Amilia was definitely the girl who gave it the most on the day and it was a joy to work with her. Some of the other girls tried hard but I didn’t feel that oomph from them. I feel that Joy was definitely the most beautiful of the group and with experience I think she could have a great career as a model.

Video Here:

All in all it was a very enjoyable experience and the people at Revlon were a joy to work with. And if you go to the BNTM site today, my image of Joy (above) is photograph of the week.

Makeup by Lauren Baker
Models Dasha and Kordula from Leni’s Model Management

I had an article about my work appear in Photography Monthly this month (June issue). This is the article pretty much as it appeared in the magazine:

LOCATION: The model shots were shot in my studio in Hackney in London and the background components were shot in a car wrecking yard in North London

CAMERA AND LENS: The car parts were shot on film. The settings for an iso 200 speed film were 1/60 at F5.6. The best images were then scanned to high res digital. The studio shots were taken on my Nikon D3x with a 105mm lens and a 50mm lens at a speed of 1/125 and F8.0 at iso 100. The tighter head shots with the 105mm and the wider body shot with the 50mm

LIGHTING: The car parts were shot using natural light and on film. The studio shots were shot with a beauty dish on a 500w head almost directly above the model looking down and another couple of lights (500w flash heads with barn doors) used as rim lights to pull her out of the dark background. With her head tilted back she got a good amount of light on her eyes but with her head in a normal position you can see we got these very deliberate dark shadows under the eyes which add to the air of mystique.

CREATIVE PROCESS: This project was very much collaboration between me and the hair stylist – Andrew Thomas-Corbett. We met a couple of times before the shoot to discuss the concept and inspiration. He was very much inspired by Aleister Crowley’s Thoth book of the Tarot and I have always had a fascination with the Occult so I was very familiar with them. The drawings on them are very beautiful. We also liked HR Geiger’s artwork (the artist who did most of the art direction for the Alien movies). We also looked at Tibetan Mandalas and a few other sources. We wanted to have an industrial feel, a sort of robotic feel but still maintain something of the organic and we wanted them to be sensual and seductive. We explained the concept clearly to the Model so she would be able to interpret our brief with as much information as possible. Our makeup was done by Angela Deviatova.

POST PRODUCTION: For the background I took parts of one of the crashed car images and mirrored it 4 ways. Thus creating a symmetrical mandala effect. The model and the hair required some basic skin cleaning and cleaning up of frizzy bits but Magda (a lovely Polish girl from Leni’s Model Management) had great skin to start with so this didn’t require much work except that it had to be done in triplicate. I normally do final skin work with a dodge and burn on a 50% gray fill layer with blend mode set to ‘Soft Light’. Then I brush with a white or black brush on a low opacity.

The next part is where it got a bit creative and required lots of masks to reveal and hide certain parts of each figure. The patterns on the skin were done with a combination of layers with a multiply blend mode and masks revealing the underlying patterns. To burn in the edges and other areas I didn’t want the viewer to be distracted by, I used a channel mixer layer set to ‘Black and White with Red Filter’, set the blending mode to ‘Multiply’, invert the mask and brush back in the areas you want with a white brush on the opacity you require. A bit complex but it gives you a great degree of control.

Finally when I’m happy, I’ll output the .jpeg and run a sharpen filter on it. I don’t like to have merged layers in my .psd file while I’m working. Non-destructive editing is the order of the day. The final series of images were exhibited in a Gallery in Bethnal Green just before Christmas 2009.

Much thanks due to Crash Taylor for the initial coverage on his site and for arranging the publication with Photography Monthly.

You can see a few more of the images from the series on this post and some more information about them too.

Click the image for a larger version.

And here’s a composite of all the girls in one image

Click for larger version.

Isn’t it bizarre how composites of women always end up looking like Natalie Portman? It’s as if she’s the template of the ‘ideal’ woman.

Makeup: Alex Gillott
Hair: Gigi Hammond
Styling and Post: Hugh O’Malley
Model: Whitney @ Leni’s Model Management

A few things I’ve really like recently. Not sure if i am going to incorporate them into my work somehow but I’ve really felt enlivened (is that a word?) by them.

Alex Box’s makeup – this is a short video about her book that she created with Rankin. What’s fascinating for me is the way the process evolved from something fixed and static and deliberately controlled into an organic exploration.

I am Mercedes Benz. Yes I know, it’s a car ad but it’s still beautiful. Makes me think of Edward Hopper, David Lynch and Philip Lorca di Corcia. Loving the underexposure, intriguing… Shot by Josh Brolin, director of ‘No Country for Old Men’

And last but not least, a short video for Savanah Wyatt‘s accessories, thanks to Miggy for the heads up.

Makeup Design by Mel Arter

A friend of mine recently had an exhibition. He’s a creative hair stylist goes by the name of Andrew Thomas Corbett and we collaborated recently to create a series of images. The show was on in the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green a few weeks ago but I’ve been too busy covering the Clothes Show in Birmingham for the last week to post about it.

A little about the show here.

The images we created are below.
Hair and Concept by Andrew
Model Magda from Leni’s Model Management
Makeup Angela Deviatova
Photography and Post by Moi…

Model Lleva @ Premier
Hair and Makeup: Gigi Hammond