Mirror mirror

This evening Megan Dalton and I did a photo shoot inspired by a photo competition themed “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. We decided to try and capture depression in our photos. Beforehand we had brainstormed and come up with a few ideas.

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Our first idea was to use a side light to create a strong shadow of Megan’s silhouette. We added a blue-green tone to the shadows in post processing.
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The second idea we had was to use mirrors to show the dichotomy between the inner self and outward perceived facade. This picture is a composite of two photos.
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The same idea as the shadow photo above, but with a slightly different expression. Here the hair is obscuring the profile.
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This photo deviates a bit from the theme. We are playing with the mirrors to see what we could create.
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This is a behind-the-scenes photo. We were using a snoot with a honeycomb pattern on the flash to restrict the light. Megan is here making sure that it is perfectly centred on her right eye.
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One more of the mirror photos. We took a lot of photos, and it was difficult to choose.
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Mirrors can be really weird. Another photo with us just playing around with them.
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Back to the theme again. This is a composite photo where we used two flashes, one with the honeycomb pattern (Amazon link) on the sitting Megan and then a second flash to light up the standing Megan. The second flash was turned off when we shot her sitting down.
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This photo was part of a two-step photo that we originally wanted to use a projector for. Unfortunately I had to hand it back this morning. Instead we tried to do it using a composite, but it did not turn out that great so we binned the idea, but kept this photo.

It was a really fun and creative evening. I liked that we had a theme that we were working around, it gave the photos a purpose. I bought the snoot for the flash after reading the Strobist’s blog and it makes a big difference for the mood when you can stop the light from going everywhere. There will be more flash photo sessions in the future. In the meantime, have a look at Megan’s blog This Space.

– Johannes

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