Sabatomic

Retouching Before & After - Chantelle

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Retouching

Here is the retouching before / after post for Chantelle James’ Test Shoot that I posted about yesterday!

Image 1: “Intensity”

To be fair, I gave her direction to look angry on this shot and that is why she looks so aggressive before retouching. I made some minor adjustments to face orientation and eye size to get this image looking the way I wanted it to. The aim was to ease up the amount of anger that was emanating from the picture, but still keep it as a strong look.

Image 2: “Freshness”

I loved this image straight from the camera, so I just made some adjustments to the right shoulder.

Image 3: “In the hood”

No image manipulations on this one, just some colour / contrast adjustment to make it look edgier, like an urban music artist promo shot.

Hope you enjoyed these!

Tags: before/after, model: chantelle james, retouching

Read more | Comments (6) | November 26th, 2008

Test Shoot with Chantelle James

Posted by sab | Filed under Beauty, Finished Images, Photography, Writeup

About a week ago I had the opportunity to shoot with Chantelle James, a striking, fresh face on the Perth modelling scene. I wanted to try something more “normal” than my usual work so I didn’t have any special theme in mind. The idea was to do a model portfolio-type test shoot with a very natural makeup look.

There wasn’t a lot of notice and a couple of the studios I checked out were booked, so we chose Chantelle’s house as the location. We shot these images in a small space in her loungeroom, amongst all the sofa chairs, against a plain light blue-coloured wall. Much to my amusement, her mother came in and gave me some strange looks at one point during the shoot.

Chantelle was a delight to work with. She was eager to follow direction, help out with styling ideas and looked just as stunning in person as she does in her photographs. Her boyfriend was around helping me out with the reflector, he was very quiet and easy to work with too.

Chantelle picked out two outfits for us to use from her wardrobe. The first was a brown strapless elasticated dress and the second was a two-piece outfit, consisting of her father’s white singlet and her mother’s vintage shorts. The latter was my favourite, really bringing out the youth and freshness in Chantelle’s look. In terms of hair styling, we went with a messy hair look in some photos, achieved with just a few hair clips, pulling some bits out. Later on, I did a sidebraid and placed a massive peachy-pink silk rose on the side of her head, which I purchased in David Jones a couple of months ago, on a whim!

Chantelle James can be found on Model Mayhem and is represented by Xtreem Model Management, there are some amazing pictures of her by Gary Sandford on her profile, you’ve got to go have a look at those :)

My next post shows you a few before and after retouching comparisons so you can see what difference my post processing has made to the original pictures.

Tags: model: chantelle james, writeup

Read more | Comments (1) | November 25th, 2008

Toilet Paper Beehive on Skye

Posted by sab | Filed under Hair Styling

Last Sunday, I did my first beehive hairstyle on Skye. This involved placing a toilet paper roll on the top of her head and covering it with hair. This brought back memories of my childhood, french braiding others’ hair at girly sleepovers (I didn’t put toilet paper in anyone’s hair when I was little, I swear!). It is only the past few months I have been getting excited about hair styling, watching youtube videos and being inspired by them.

I was inspired to try this after watching this video/parody of “How To Create an Amy Winehouse Beehive“. Another great video that I watched was “Super Easy Beehive Hairstyle“. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the hair going up, perhaps next time - if Skye will let me do it again!

Reports from Skye indicate that it took 3 people to take this hairstyle out. I had to zip off to another photoshoot and wasn’t around to help deconstruct it. I can imagine it would have been a bit of a nightmare with the amount of teasing and hairspray that went into it to get the required volume. Thank you for letting me experiment on your hair, Skye!

Here’s a closeup shot of the hair:

Instructions

If you’re interested, the beehive hairstyle involved these 3 basic stages:

1. Put all the hair into hot rollers, sectioning the hair in a strip down the middle and then doing the sides afterwards. Ensure hot rollers and rolled inwards toward the center point. Leave hot rollers for about 25 minutes.

2. Remove central hot roller from top of the head, tease and then spray with hairspray. Thread hair into toilet roll and secure with bobby pins.

3. Working from the middle outwards, undo hot rollers one by one, teasing & spraying them with hairspray and then securing them to the toilet roll / rest of the hair, so that none of the toilet roll is visible.

My beehive was a bit messy on the outside due to my inexperience. There were a few dents where I tried to pin the hair into the pile and it left a dent. Skye had the great idea of covering it with ribbon and flowers, so you can’t see the dents in these photos :)

I’m taking a casual interest in hair styling, if anyone has any interesting links/videos showing how to do various styles, please share them in the comments :) Thanks!

Tags: beehive, Hair Styling, model: princess skye

Read more | Comments (3) | November 21st, 2008

Hime Gyaru J-fashion - Finished Images

Posted by sab | Filed under Finished Images, Photography

Here are the final processed photographs from the Hime Gyaru photoshoot I wrote about a couple weeks back. This is a mocked up a fake magazine cover of a fictitious magazine called “agehu”. I tried to process the photos in a similar style to “ageha” magazine images, hence the extreme airbrushing of skin and proliferation of sparkles.

Here is a full length shot of the outfit and backdrop.

One portrait-style photograph:

Go to my flickr account to see the rest, there’s quite a few more over there :)

Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabbiesab/sets/72157607778018967/

Tags: fake magazine cover, makeup artist: jane wong, model: marlene lim

Read more | Comments (4) | November 10th, 2008

Pumpkin Carving on Halloween

Posted by sab | Filed under Crafting, Travel

I went down to Dunsborough this weekend with friends. Celine was awesome and bought pumpkins for us to carve as well as a sheet to put on the table, carving utensils and patterns. The pumpkins were literally hard to carve and took a long time to scrape out to an acceptable one inch width for carving. We all wondered how people in the US did this on a regular basis, but had fun along the way regardless :)

Here is the custom design that my partner in crime helped me to carve out using corn cob stabby things, a cheap knife and a miniature saw from the pumpkin carving kit.