Candy Cult

Posted by sab | Filed under Miscellaneous, Photography, Uncategorized

Visited Candy Cult with Skye a couple of weekends ago to see Chisa’s artworks. The exhibition was really inspiring and cute, featuring a mix of vector and hand-drawn illustrations printed onto thick white cardboard. I love this style of illustration, and it was great to see that most of the pieces were from local artists :) Skye and I pored over each piece and walked out feeling happier.

The exhibition is still on if you’re interested, check out the details on the Candy Cult website. I would highly recommend it!

Read more | Comments (4) | October 28th, 2008

Floating Along With My Camera

Posted by sab | Filed under Illustration

When I booted up my computer this morning, I felt compelled to open up Adobe Illustrator. It’s been quite a while since the last time I made anything in there just for the fun of it.

Before you start criticising the proportions / perspectives, I would like to acknowledge that I am not a particularly good illustrator!

Cross posted to deviantART (larger version):
http://saelle.deviantart.com/art/Floating-Along-101077410

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Read more | Comments (7) | October 18th, 2008

Escape to her Garden Sanctuary - Part I

Posted by sab | Filed under Fashion, Photography, Writeup

Concept of this shoot: A girl wanders out into her garden and discovers the joy of the natural surrounds there, losing her inhibitions and becomes immersed in the beauty of nature.

I noticed Kerry Edmonstone’s striking look and contacted her about arranging a shoot. I took on the task of styling and visited her house to have look at her clothes. In the process, I noticed how beautiful her overgrown garden was. Coupled with the abundance of ruffles and lace in her wardrobe, the idea for the shoot was born.

I contacted my friend Jane Wong to be the makeup artist for the shoot and gave her free reign over the look.

Cut to last Saturday: A soft tune floated across the bedroom to my body in slumber. It was 4:50am. Gathering my things and getting dressed, I was excited about the day ahead of me. Jane and I all assembled at Kerry’s house at 5:30am. Kerry sipped coffee.

Here’s a shot of Kerry’s bed, completely covered in tulle petticoats and other things we used for the shoot.

Time seemed to pass too quickly while Jane was applying the makeup and finishing the hair.

During this time, I popped out to scout the back yard. I could see that the light was perfect, but also knew that makeup and hair would take another hour and the light would not be the same by then :(

I crept back into the house and pinned the artifical butterflies to the bouffant white tulle petticoat.

By the time we were done with hair and makeup it was about 7:30am.

Please note: The final images will be posted in Part II.

Lowlights

Time of Day

It was ~7:30am by the time we were ready to start shooting. The sun had moved well above the horizon and blasted bright cheery morning light into Kerry’s garden. I mentally noted that I would need to wake earlier to catch that elusive, mysterious early morning light and carried on with the photoshoot. We cut one look out of the editorial because we were still shooting at 11am, and by then it was too getting too bright. It’s a little ironic that I’m calling this issue a lowlight…

Breaking my umbrellas

Occasional slight breezes blew the lightweight Manfrotto Nano stands over a handful of times. Multiple tumbles slightly demented the hollow metal stem and spindly arms of my white and silver Westcott 43″ double fold umbrellas. I had too much faith in their ability to bounce back from such incidents and there was sufficient damage to warrant the acquisition of some new umbrellas.

Mosquitos

Kerry’s garden was rife with mosquitos, the ruthless parasites eagerly awaited fresh blood. Kerry probably suffered the worst, as she was standing still for the long periods of time and was not entirely covered up. I caught 3 mosquitos in the act, and 3 or 4 of them got away before I realised, leaving behind angry white bumps in a sea of redness.


Picture of a Mosquito taken by Alvegaspar

Highlights

The Garden

Kerry’s garden was wonderful, featuring rich shrubbery and litte splashes of colour provided by patches of flowers. My favourite part were the twisted vines climbing around a giant tree in the center of her garden.

I tried to minimise the appearance of things such as a swimming pool, clothing line, the asbestos fence and the neighbours’ tin roof. I made some tradeoffs in “niceness of foliage” vs “bad stuff in the background”, this will become more obvious when the finished images are revealed.

Blue Steel

Kerry has this amazing “intense look” that came intuitively to her, which I really liked. She referred to it as her version of the Blue Steel.

Experimenting with flash on location

It was fun to experiment. At first, I wanted to use only natural light and a reflector as I have in the past, but at the last minute decided to use strobes & umbrellas. This is the difference that a flash can make:

There’s still some shadow under the left eye, but it is a definite improvement.

Fun times

I was 5 or more metres away when I took this, so I don’t know what they were laughing about :)

Kerry had very boufy, teased hair at the end of the day. We had to flatten it down using water and gentle coaxing. Kerry has amazing, beautiful thick hair which is fantastic to tease, I hope she did not have too much trouble combing it out!

Bunny

Kerry’s pet rabbit was hopping about the house and garden throughout the day. The furry creature seemed curious about the shoot, nibbling on grass nearby, watching with shiny, beady eyes.

Kerry said that rabbits were the perfect pet: very quiet and low maintenance. I have been hankering for a pet rabbit ever since that day!

The shoot was fun and I was very happy with the images we made together :) Hope to upload the completed images soon, look out for Part II with our 4-image mini editorial.

Kerry borrowed my petticoat skirts to shoot with a talented photographer on Sunday: Sylvia Niderla. she’s already uploaded a couple of photos here and here :)

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Read more | Comments (3) | October 15th, 2008

J-fashion: Hime Gyaru Photoshoot - Part I

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Themed, Writeup

J-fashion is one of my secret fascinations, and recently Hime Gyaru style has really caught my attention. Hime Gyaru is an indulgent and elegant style, girls who follow this style look for dresses with an abundance of ruffles and bows. They drape themselves with pearls, roses, sparkling jewels and more bows! To complete the look, girls will tease and curl their peroxided hair into huge bouffant styles. They look like real princesses!

The most famous Hime Gyaru store in Japan is Jesus Diamante, have a look at the site if you’re curious. It is completely in Japanese, but pictures speak across language barriers ;)

Marlene Lim approached me about modelling in a shoot, mentioning J-fashion amongst other things and I ran with this particular idea. I enlisted the help of my friend Cheryl in styling, she is quite knowledgeable about this style, she has travelled to Japan several times and keeps up with the trends through magazines and videos. I had Jane Wong onboard for makeup - I discovered she also has a secret fascination with this particular style.

Lowlights

Restricted Space

We worked in a spare room out the back of my house. There’s barely room for the backdrop, even before I put up the light stands and umbrellas. I took more close crops of Marlene’s face and torso for this reason. I also did that because she looked so darn cute!

Temperamental Flash

Every 2 or 3 photographs, the flash I used to light up the legs did not work. I could not find the spare pair of batteries sp I grabbed the first lot I could find, which were a freebie pack. I suspect they were too low power to work properly - please tell me this is a viable theory, I’d hate to think the flash itself was faulty.

There were not a lot of lowlights, so let’s move onto the positives!

Highlights

Styling

Having the help of Cheryl in sourcing and making materials was a massive relief. She remembered this awesome Dotti dress when nothing else in the shops was suitable. I bought it in a size Medium in the hopes that one day I can wear it. Jane laughs when I say things like that!


The dress was clipped at the back to the model’s size, she’s a lot smaller than a medium for sure!

I bought a metre of black satin to make the bows - we made a few little small ones for the hair, which we lated hot glued to hair clips. I learned that hot glue doesn’t stick particularly well to metal. We made bows for the shoes and decided to use sticky tape on them to attach to Marlene’s shoes. I left Cheryl with the task of making a giant bow for the front of the dress, a week later she produced an amazingly straight bow for us to use! Cheryl lined it with a canvas material inside to hold its shape better.

We made the necklace together: Cheryl masterminded the design, I bought the materials and we put it together as a team!

The Wig

I think it speaks for itself. The wig is fantastic quality. I could even wash it if I wanted to, but I’m scared the curls will wash out to a small extent. It saved a heap of time on hair styling, as it came pre-curled and only required a bit of combing to settle the way we wanted it. I cannot thank my friends Shasta and Christine enough for helping get my hands on this gem. I try it on when nobody is looking.

Here’s Marlene wearing a wig cap, she looked adorable with it on:

And then after the wig went on:

The Backdrop

It was a great relief when the backdrop came together. On Thursday before the shoot, Cheryl and I were stood in the middle of Spotlight scratching our heads. Initially, we decided that a bubblegum pink backdrop would be wonderful and picked out the material. We then stumbled upon this rose backdrop and changed plan completely, which I am very thankful for. In hindsight, a pink backdrop would have looked tacky.

The materials I purchased to go into the backdrop were:

  • rose curtain material
  • yellow gold organza
  • creamy-gold satin
  • artificial flowers

Here are some photographs of the backdrop being deconstructed:

I discovered I have magical draping abilities with a box of safety pins and the cream-gold satin. It is all pretty straightforward, I just used safety pins, elastic bands, clamps and more safety pins! I hear you can get cheap clamps from Bunnings.

Makeup

We had lots of fun discussing makeup tips for asian features and how to make the eyes look bigger :) Marlene came wearing coloured contacts and bought a heap of fake eyelashes from overseas to choose from! I’m not sure exactly what went on with makeup, during this time I was running around putting up the backdrop and making chicken nuggets for us to snack on ;)

I know that we ended up doubling up the eyelashes, and strategically put eyeliner on the bottom lid to make the eyes look rounder and open them up.

I also know that it looked awesome, thanks to Jane!

Having Fun

I do not really know what to write about this so here are some pictures:

I had a great time and am really happy with the results of the shoot and the effort that everyone put in to making it a success. Thanks guys!

I have to get back to postwork on this shoot now, look for Part II of this post for the final images!

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Read more | Comments (7) | October 14th, 2008

Flower Picking with Princess Skye

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Themed, Writeup

Skye and I ventured out to a flower field to take some photographs in one of her beautiful vintage dresses. I was really stuck on what to write about this photoshoot, you can read more eloquent musings about the shoot over at Skye’s Blog :) And now, back to the photographs:

Edit: Some of these images look artifacty, will be re-uploading them in higher JPG quality later.

And now for something a little different…

Behind the Scenes

Skye made a wreath of flowers using some wire:

I plaited her hair into french braids, this was especially fun as it reminded me of my childhood. I have not plaited hair since I was a kid, braiding dolls’ hair and friends’ hair at girly sleepovers.

Flowers, reaching towards the light:

We brought a blanket for Skye to sit on. I was lying on my reflector for the shots where both Skye and I were lying on the ground. There was mass carnage of squashed flowers!

Photographer’s comments

No flash was used because I wanted to use only a reflector for fill. I started out using the white side, but found that the gold side gave a really nice warm tone, and stuck with that for the majority of the shoot.

The post processing brightened everything up and punch up the greens and pinks in the image, keeping it fairly natural-looking. This is a fairly big departure from what I usually do.

It was fun to try something different and great to get outdoors and shoot something on location! Shooting outside brings up a host of issues revolving around the presence of the sun. I would have loved to use a wider aperture for more background blur on these shots, so the houses in the background would be less distracting. I plan to buy neutral density filters so that I can use a wider aperture and get the same amount of light coming in.

I regret not taking Skye up on the offer of waking her roommate to come along and hold the reflector for me, the reflector was acting as a straight fill in these shots and might have looked better from an angle. In some cases, I could not even hold the reflector in a suitable position to generate fill. At least Mirai got to snooze in longer!

In the last shot, Skye has the characteristic raccoon eyes from the sun that every beginner photographer is advised to avoid. For this reason I discarded the photo but Skye liked this shot, so I kept it in the set. What do you think?

Hope you enjoyed the set!

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Read more | Comments (8) | October 9th, 2008

Visions of Launceston, Tasmania

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Travel

I went to Launceston, Tasmania over the weekend. On this trip, I packed a Canon 400D and two primes, a 24mm L series lens and 85mm f/1.8 lens.

We stayed at the Old Bakery Inn, which had cosy traditional furnishings and decorations.

Walked to Cataract Gorge from the Inn, went on the chairlift ride across the Gorge, got off at the other side and hiked up to Eagle Eye Lookout.

Went to a function centre out of the city as the sun set through a cloudy sky. The location and well-kept gardens were beautiful.

A little dog led the way on our exploration of the grounds. The light was perfect at this time of day.

The bridge over a mini-lake in the gardens was closed off for repairs. Peeking through the wooden barrier, this shot reminded me of a horror-survival game.

Portrait of cheerful Grandma, she has a special sparkle in her eyes :)

And then it was time to go home…

I would have liked to stay longer in Launceston, but we had to fly out early on Sunday. We did not end up seeing the Monkeys! However, I did get back in time to eat this work of art:

… there’s a blurry Skye in the background!

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Read more | Comments (4) | October 8th, 2008