Emily's Photoshoot

Each dress and outfit hold a personal connect for her, some clothes are given to her by family members and others hold memories.

She looks like a painting here, the face position and her special hair band combined with her deep black dress give this effect. It was a challenge to light this as her dress really sucked in light, it was hardly reflective at all like felt. I used a large soft box to get soft shadows across her face and shot it as a soft Rembrandt.

I like this shot it looks so natural, she looks calm and relaxed, and her hair flows nicely. We considered using a wind fan, but could not get hold of one on the day.

Here I went really in depth when retouching, as always I sorted out the white balance, tone curves, contrast and highlights/shadows and white/black levels. I then used an action I made in photoshop that pulls a crazy amount of detail out of photographs.I used this effect especially for the cardigan as it has this wonderful texture that was just begging for me to sharpen it.

I chose to frame Emily on the right hand side to add tension to the image. Her body position is partially pointing to the right of the image, so I felt framing it like this made it seem she was moving away from the dark left area of the frame.

This was actually I test shot I took just after adjusting the lighting and she was just moving her top, but it captures her natural strong character so well and for her brief on Self-Identity it had to be one of the final images.

I used a half second shutter for this picture which gave it this gold movement effect. Her smile is stunning and where her arms are look perfect. When retouching I made sure to retain the Gold colouring and I pulled more colour out of the RAW file. The gold reflects Emily's sunny happy disposition in contrast to the first dark photographs where she is remembering.