As you may know, in 2016 I'm completing a 12-month Theme-based portrait challenge with fellow photographers Sunny Lee and Bill Whitmire.
At this point, several other folks have entered into the challenge.
February's theme is Ice. My immediate idea was to reach out to local Hair and Makeup Artist Kasha Rodig to see if she'd like to collaborate on some ideas. Tell a makeup artist "ice", and they are filled with ideas. Tell Kasha "ice" and her cup overfloweth.
One huge point of this challenge is to explore creativity that we don't often get hired for on commercial jobs. And I have full confidence in Kasha's bag of incredible tricks that she'd come up with something not only classy, but stunning.
Our first task was casting talent. We found Wilhelmina Model Haley Berge, and she jumped on board.
We then roped in Lisa Gombert to style the shoot, and of course Tina was there to art direct.
On set we had our assistant Luis Marin and our intern Nicole Siuda.
On my end, I tried the shot on white background and on black. On black I used some Atmosphere Aerosol to give it a sense of place. I wanted the image to be painterly, cold, and piercing. Haley nailed the look right away, and I took very few frames after this one.
I used two Paul C. Buff Einsteins for lighting. For light modification, I used a beauty dish without diffusion camera right for the key and a large softbox with grid for a rim up high to camera left. We used my Hasselblad H3DII-31 with a 80mm lens set at 1/800th, f9.5, ISO100.
It's amazing to collaborate with other folks and to surround myself with such talent. This is art. And it's such a feeling of heaven and gratitude when people work together like this. Thanks to all involved and thank you for taking time to take a look.
Enjoy a couple behind the scenes shots below.
