It’s been a while hasn’t it but I finally took some self portraits. I decided I wanted to do a beauty shoot, something with sleek hair and use gels because I don’t think I have ever used them before. I remembered Lindsay Adler having a lot of tutorials about using gels so I did a bit of a browse and found this lighting guide. I obviously don’t have the exact same stuff as her but the idea was the same.
It was a rough go at first and a really difficult shoot to do, especially since it’s all self portraits. I tried different colour gels, played with the lighting and tried to pull my look together. I nearly gave up because everything was boring useless shit at the beginning and no joke, I ended up with 200 photos with missed focus like the one above, and then deleted another 200 where I had a stupid pose or what ever.
I shot with the Nikkor 70-200mm lens zoomed in at 200mm, with a pretty tight crop. I had my camera tethered to a laptop so I could see everything immediately. For beauty shots every detail matters and I had to try and smooth my hair how I wanted it to look and then try not to move until I got the shot. I was also sporting a super thick gloss on my lips so I had to be careful not to mess it.
Here is how my shoot started, 200+ pics of trial and error, and then at the end of this post is the first shot that made it to the editing table. It was a long way to get there but god damn am I glad I did it and I’m so excited for the results.
You can see that when you are super precise during all the prep and shoot, there isn’t anything drastic to be done on Photoshop. I do want to do a super clean plastic doll vibe though so I’m gonna edit accordingly. Maybe. We’ll see tomorrow.
