I’ve been so busy lately with shoots, work and life in general, that I haven’t even updated some of the coolest shoots I’ve ever done on my blog. Bad Steve! I’ve been working with a few really talented, creative and fun individuals (models, makeup artists and assistants) that have helped shape a new direction for me in photography.

One of those individuals who has really inspired me to do some really creative things is Jeanine. You may have seen some of her work previously in the Going Home series and the industrial shoot that we did. She got together with a fantastic makeup artist named Pepa Chan who had this wonderful idea to do a gory marionette in a forest theme. A what? Yeah, hehe, that’s often the first words that come out after an outrageous theme is suggested, but this one was really cool. Pepa made up Jeanine like she was just attacked by Edward Scissorhands. The makeup was fantastic! She also solicited the help of a hair stylist (Style Genius) who did an amazing job on Jeanine’s hair, and a wardrobe stylist (Sandra Savage) who fleshed out the rest of the look.

For a location, we were going to head to Redwood Park in Cloverdale, but I had some free time before the shoot so I scouted out Central park and found this really cool stump/log that was in front of a rather large tree. It also fortunately had a big branch above where Jeanine would pose, so we could run the strings up and over and “control” her. Her roommate Jordan (and my esteemed assistant) controlled the strings (haha..probably the only time he could ever say THAT about Jeanine) and we proceeded to make things look a bit dark.

This was shot in the middle of the afternoon with the sun actually filtering through the branches at some points, but I decided to make it look darker by upping the shutter speed to sync at 1/400 or 1/500. I used an SB600 flash camera right shooting through an umbrella for the main light, and an SB25 camera left bouncing off a reflective umbrella and with a blue gel for the “moonlight” sort of effect.

I processed these almost entirely in Lightroom with some finishing touches in Photoshop. I went with a but more of a surreal, edgy effect, which seemed to suit the mood of the theme. You can see all the photos from this set here on Flickr.