The Art of Being a Hired Gun

One of the hardest things as an artists is when you lose creative control. For most of my work the shoot is my concept, and the results are the collaboration of the way I approach taking photographs and the way the model moves her body in front of the camera. As long as when the images are finished we are both happy, and the job has been done properly. But as time has gone, and I've been able to really figure out and refine my style I get opportunities I really hadn't pursued, or even thought of before like shooting a jewelry look book.

I've done a decent amount of commercial work before. Lots of plane product on white background, and a handful of fashion lines look books. Its not my favorite thing in the world. Fortunately when Acanthus talked to Nicole and I about doing this she had a really creative concept that I thought we could work well with and create something cool. Nicole and Acanthus jewelry put together a mood/inspiration pintarest that I used to get an idea of what they were looking for. The thing I love about photography is problem solving.

My goal was to blend the spirit of Acanthus' new Vanitas Collection with the inspiration from the mood board, and still maintain some of my style. You can see a lot of the back and forth and how the inspiration between Nicole and Acanthus gave us ideas on the Pintarest they put together. I was already leaning towards using black velvet as the back drop because I love the way it absorbs light, so when we found the dead bird outside of our house I knew that if we kept it simple (jewelry, makeup, prop, uncluttered background) we would have the makings of some fantastic photos...perfectly dark and perfectly moody.

I shot all of these my 70-200mm F2.8 L. It is my go to lens for product/fashion look books. You get a lot of control over the depth of field an image is going to have, and it has a nice and narrow field of view that is perfect for minimizing distractions. For lights I decided to steer away from my 60 inch softbox, my favorite modifier, and use my profoto monolite with a beauty dish instead. I wanted a more specular light quality to give the jewelry and metal a deeper contrast from the highlights to shadows.

Our makeup artist Kylie Boughter did an amazing job painting Nicole's arm this beautifully corpse like color, that gave me something to play around with in photoshop. As well as making Nicole's actual makeup flawless.

The retouching for this was fairly simple. I kicked out a little bit of color in my ACR edit, and then ran my fade action (tutorial part of $10 a month pledge level) a slightly haunting more murky feel. After I did this sort of global/tonal edit I passed off the skin retouching to Nicole. Its important when doing a bigger project like this to know where your strengths are, and I have never had the patience for beauty retouching like she does, and she did an amazing job.

I'm so proud of the end result that all of our brains together ended up creating, and am very grateful to Nicole, Acanthus, and Kylie for making this all come together.