Beauty in Almere

August 14, 2017

Beauty in Almere

Several months ago, photographer Vincent Kos of Vincent Kos Studio, invited me to participate in a casting shoot for a couple of model agencies. So many models--or potential models--went by me that day that it was impossible to spend more than about fifteen minutes with any one person. This meant it was not easy to make changes to the lighting setup after I started. Another issue for me was that the models were asked to not wear makeup for the test. This makes sense for the agencies, but for me it made it more difficult to get what I wanted. I got some decent shots, but wanted to make them better. For these reasons, I decided to do another shoot with some of these models, so there would be time for hair styling, makeup, and multiple light setups.

At first, I posted a general call for models on Facebook, but that didn't yield any serious replies. Next, I picked five models from the Kos shoot and contacted them directly, after getting permission from their agent, Guido Wolters, of Division Model Management. Two were unavailable, but the remaining three: Jasmijn Keuken, Alexandra van Dorp, and Lionne Hobert were available and willing to do the shoot. Soroya Bokadid, a makeup artist based in Amsterdam completed the group. The models were coming from towns in the furthest north and south of the Netherlands, which made travel time an issue. To resolve it, I rented a studio in Almere, roughly in the middle of all the cities we were coming from. The studio, Studio 34x, has two shoot stages, one painted white, the other black. I rented the white side of the space, primarily because I wanted to make bright head shot portraits of the models.

I rented a car for the drive to Almere, to save the trouble of carrying my heavy equipment onto two trains and a bus, not to mention about fifty euros of taxi rides on either end. I got a late start because I picked up the car in the morning of the day of the shoot. Normally I would have picked it up the day before, but I didn't feel like paying extra for that. Once I was on the road in my beautiful rented Hyundai i30, the trip meter didn't let me forget that I was forty minutes late for my goal of being at the studio at 09:00. I wasn't too worried though, because the first model wouldn't be there until 11:00, and Soroya the MUA at about the same time.

At the studio, the studio manager, Michiel Fischer was there, but no one else. This gave us some time to set up the lights. What I wanted to get were three light setups minimum, more if we had time. Because the stage is large and Michiel had a lot of lights, we made three setups in three corners of the room, so that I wouldn't have to change them throughout the day to get the different looks I wanted. Overall, my goal was to get a few portraits that were reminiscent of studio photographs of actors from the 1940's. I wanted three versions of this, one bright, one dark, and one gray. To get them, the first light setup was backlit, the second had a weak light on the wall behind the model, and the third had a strong shadow on the wall. I also wanted hard light, so we stuck with reflectors on most of the lights instead of softboxes.

I shot everything with my Phase One XF with an IQ3-100 back. The lens was the Schneider-Kreuznach 120 mm macro LS. This is a fantastic camera, with 100 MP resolution and 16-bit color depth, it is hard to beat. The lens is also great, and has become my favorite lens to work with. With the lens attached, it is a heavy camera, so I did most of the shooting on a tripod.

At about 11:00, Jasmijn arrived with her mother, and a few minutes later, Soroya arrived. I was still working with the lights, so the timing was pretty good. Jasmijn went into makeup and also had her hair styled by a friend that Soroya had brought with her. In about a half hour, we were all ready and started the shoot. Below are some of the images, in the order they were shot. First, Jasmijn.

My original idea was to go for a more seventies look, and I did that with Jasmijn, but switched to forties/fifties later with Lionne and Alexandra. Jasijn had beautiful pale skin and pale blond hair, and I wanted to bring that out with bright lighting. Below are the results, and a few experiments with more cinematic lighting.

Lionne came in after Jasmijn. For her, we decided to put some wave in her hair for a more old-fashioned look. My favorite shot in this group is the black and white head shot because her bone structure is so clear, but I'm happy with the others also.

Alexandra came at the end of the day, but we got some good shots right away, probably because of all the practice with the lighting earlier, so we experimented a bit more and got some full-length shots as well as head shots.