Megan "Cloud" Shoot - The Process (Patreon)

I recently posted the full set of these images for my All Access patrons, and I had a request to explain how I went about shooting them.

Meg and I had discussed shooting a set in this style, using hollowfibre stuffing, a full year before we actually managed to shoot. So my first task was to source the hollowfibre. Amazon seemed the most obvious place, but many of the reviews O read mentioned the stuffing not be4ing virgin, and having random pieces of fabric attached (i.e. as if it had been recycled). So I started to look further afield and in the end purchased from Textile Passion in the UK. Not having a clue how much I would need I ended up ordering 5kg of the stuff... in the end we probably used about a kilo of it, and all that went back into the sack. So I'll probably be doing these shoots for years to come!

Lighting

Although I use studio flash for a lot of my work, a lot of what I call me "Red" work is shot using a continuous LED light, specifically an Aputure Amaran 200x with octabox. For this style of shoot I put on a mood playlist and encourage the model to focus on the music and pose in a more free-flowing manner. Without the distraction of a flash, many models find it easier to go with the flow of the music, and I also don't have to worry about flash refresh rate. Shooting this way I feel I can create images with more emotion and expression in the model's face. Some models have struggled with this style of shooting, others (including Meg) loved it.

The light is bi-colour, and I used it on the 5600k setting. I also have my lighting stand mounted on a wheeled dolly, which allows me to move it much more easily as I am shooting. I will give more details about the equipment I use in future posts.

Camera, etc

Canon 5D mk IV

24-70mm f/2.8 lens with K&F Concept Black Mist Filter 1. On top of this I have also used an inexpensive UV lens with Vaseline seamed around the inner circumference in order to achieve the soft effect around the edges of the images.

ISO 640; 1/320 sec; f/4

I find that the LED light combined with the above settings and accessories produces the soft look that I like in my images.

Editing

I'm not going to go into my full process, but my basic process was as follows:

Initial tweaks to lighting and tones, etc. in Adobe Lightroom

Import into Photoshop for blemish retouching, and tidying up and blurring of the hollowfibre. I then run a Photoshop action that creates the adjustment layers for skin smoothing, dodge and burn, eye whitening/brightening, etc.

After the retouching I then do more colour toning. I have various sets of tones saved in my Photoshop libraries, and usually start off by trying these until I find one that I think works well with the images, and then do additional tweaking, usually with a curves adjustment layer.

I then save the final images, and tweak slightly in Lightroom again if required.