6 Looks, 2 Models: A Beauty Shoot

It started the way many collaborations do; on Instagram! Tamara Melville of T-Amoi Makeup Artistry recently contacted me via Instagram with the idea to do a beauty shoot with some clean, popping looks. She loved the photo set from my shoot with Toni and was interested in collaborating with me. Now, it’s always great when someone loves your work, but it feels even better when it’s someone whose work you also love! I’ve been a fan of her blush looks, and it was a great chance for us to work on a dope project together.

Tamara came up with the concept of doing some clean, dewy looks with smoky, dramatic eyes and bold lips. As she showed me the images from her mood board, I could see the shoot coming together in my mind. Once we got that down, what came next was casting. She suggested Danielle-Kay Northover (repped by Pulse Models) for the looks involving smokey eyes, and the more colourful looks were done with Cleopatra Whyte, also repped by Pulse Models.

With casting done, all that was left to do was prep and shoot. Knowing it was going to be a long day, I reached out to my friend and colleague Jik-Reuben Pringle to assist me with the day’s work. We looked through the mood board to get not just the vibe of the shoot, but to work on how we were going to light it. Being creative and whimsical is great, but it has to intersect with technicality! We used 4 speedlights, 3 softboxes (one on a boom arm) and a 7” zoom reflector for most of the shots throughout the day, with a solid mix of butterfly and loop lighting techniques, and a few in-betweens.

A rough idea of what the setup was like.

Everyone got together at my home studio, and we settled in for a long day of fun shots! The day went incredibly smoothly, with Tamara creating gorgeous looks, DKay and Cleopatra giving us amazing poses and expressions. Shooting went even smoother because I chose to shoot tethered, with the images popping up in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on a display. This kind of workflow made it easy for the models, the makeup artist and I to see exactly what was happening when the lights went off, and to see if any changes needed to be made (more technical stuff to the rescue).

In the end, we all had a great time and loved the final looks. I’m happy to share the final images with you. Enjoy!