Images from college shoot

The setting up of the shoot was a lot more simple and straight forward than I had thought, with a bit of technical input, the lighting, which I thought would be 2 soft boxes, to the left and the right of the model, turned out not to be.
It was instead a single Flash unit, positioned above the camera, pointing slightly down and directly at the model, attached to this was a ring flash type diffuser, and it was set t o continuous and flash mode. This enabled a continuous soft light, with the flash producing the shadows seen in the supplied image.

The piece of checker plate was stood on a wooden box and leaning at a slight angle against another bigger box, to prevent it from falling onto my model, I clamped it to a metal frame, more commonly used for hanging cloth studio backgrounds from, with the legs opened out wide at either end it had very little or no chance of falling over. The model was then positioned on a stool in front of this.

My camera was mounted on the stand and turned to a profile shooting position, and I set it in full manual mode, To aperture F5.6 Shutter speed 1/60 sec and White balance to flash mode.

So this is the 1st test shot I took of the model, and it turned out pretty much spot on, and I felt quite happy there would be not much need for adjustments.

So then I took one more Test shot whilst waiting for the models nails to dry! and this is it.
Her head is slightly tilted to give a better impression of the shadow that will be present when her hand is in the same area as her face.

Still happy with the lighting, and her nails now dry, the model grabbed her make-up props and we tried our 1st attempts at replicating the shot she liked and had taken her inspiration from. (seen here)

And this is the result, The model is a none smoker and said that it felt more natural to her to hold the lipstick in her right hand, which is the only reason for it being different to the comparsion shot above.
Apart from this I think it is a close match, the subject is to the right of the image,  both heads are slightly tilting towards the left of the picture, and they both have a hand holding lipstick in front of there mouths.
I think the only thing to do now is to convert to black and white, keeping the colour in the end of the lipstick.

However Striving for a closer match we, looked at the reference image, and at out 1st image, and made a couple of adjustments.
The main one in this image is the models look/eyes, they are a little more closed, mainly due to her head being tilted slightly backwards. And we also got rid of the brush she was holding in her left, which in the last shot is visible in the bottom left.

So this is the 3rd attempt of the shot, and a bit of a compromise between, the head being tilted back and the eyes being slightly more closed.
The leaning of the shoulder is there, and a nice yet not over powering shadow under her chin.
Both being fairly happy with this we moved onto other aspects of the shot.

After looking at the last shot we took and comparing it to the image we were working from, we decided that, The model should have the lipstick in her mouth, and took this shot.
This was the 1st and only one we took like this, after deciding it didn't look right.
However looking at it now, the models hand is better positioned, all fingers are straight, which is closer to the reference image, and the position of the lipstick in relationship to the mouth is better.
The only thing that it needs in my opinion, is the model needed to be positioned closer to the right of the image.







On seeing this the model made a comment about the background being slightly blurred, I said I could try and adjust the Aperture and Shutter speeds accordingly to make the dept of field shallower.

So this was the aperture adjusted from F 5.6 to F11 but for some reason only adjusted the shutter speed to 1/40 from 1/60.

 So this is the Aperture turned back to F9 and the Shutter speeds stayed at 1/40.
I showed these 2 images to the model, and asked if she preferred the background how it was before, or how it was in these shots.
After talking about it, we decided to stick with the deeper depth of field.
Also at this point in time both me and the model decided that we had got the shots we were after in regards to the reference image, opted for a prop change and went for a make-up brush.

This is the 1st shot we did with a prop change, nothing else changed on the camera or lighting front.

This is the second picture with the prop change, and all we have changed is a closer cropped zoom, and the position of the brush as it looked a bit awkward in the previous image.

So in this image I have kept the crop close and tight on the models face, but put the brush back on her face. Only this time a different angle, more of the side of the brush against her face, rather than the tip of the brush on her face. Also tilter her head slightly to the right of the image.
This looks better than previous, but both me and the model  felt there was something missing, or not looking quite right.

To try and get the something that was missing into the image, we tried introducing the other hand, to even out the image. Instead of bringing in another prop, we just went with a playing of the hair.
The other main difference is the brush is again off the face, but now pointing it in the opposite direction and centralising it to make it more of a feature of the image.

Liking the above image with the other hand now playing a part of messing up the hair, we took it 1 step further and introduced a compact mirror, to compliment the brush.
This is the 1st one of these, and we played aorund with hand positions with these 2 props.

This was the next position we tried, I like this one alot. The zoom crop is wider allowing more of the checker plate to be seen. I also like the way the cross over of the arms creates a nice V shape.