The art of Modern Photography meets the creative flair of contemporary hairstyling.

Flowers and Colours

Every highly creative photographic project requires one essential ingredient: the concept, the common denominator to which all of the experts involved must refer at every stage of the work undertaken. In this article, we record the intense and highly colourful day of artistic creation, decorated with flowers, with images of the work-in-progress and of the final creations delivered to the customers.

Upon arrival at the work location, you can see the photo shoot areas, equipped with the basic items I use in all of my work: computer for live view of images, colour checker, light meter, required lenses.

Using images of reference, the hairstylist establishes, together with the photographer, artistic director and model, the objectives to be achieved.

From there, we move on to selecting the flowers to use on the model and to decorate the photo set. We are truly spoilt for choice in terms of colour, shape and size.

The first hairstyle requires particular care and attention due to the unusually tall hair support, the decoration base for flowers and stems of ivy.

During the first stage of preparation of the model, we start setting up the first photo set, organising the lights and light modifiers, accessories and screens, colour filters, recreating an atmosphere of woodland and fairies indoors.

The main light for the first photo set was created by combining 3 Lastolite Professional Hotrod Strip softboxes (30x120cm) in a triangle formation and lit by small sliding flash heads. We arranged a few dry branches to create a frame in the foreground, which ends up out of focus in the final image, thanks to the wide aperture (f4); a very popular technique that has its origins in cinema. The background is made up of a Lastolite Professional cloth folding screen (grey/black, 1.80×2.15m), appropriately coloured by two creative colour filters mounted on laterally positioned portable flash heads.

Image of the complete first photo set, set up and ready for the first shots.

The light used to illuminate the hair, which is essential to this form of photography and indispensable for our initial concept, was created using a 500W/sec Elinchrom monotorch mounted on a Lastolite Professional Ezybox II Square Small softbox (Code LS2710) with a speed ring adaptor (Code LS2352N), together with a nylon grid (Code LS2950) that is able to reduce substantially the peripheral light dispersion and background contamination.

Here are two original images and subsequent post-production processed versions, created within first photo set.

The day proceeded with the setting up of another two photo sets (including outdoors), of which we have shared only the final images, due to lack of space.

The images you can admire here in this article are the result of the professionalism, talent, collaborative spirit and desire to stand out from the crowd shared by all the figures involved, which all qualities essential to such a complex creative project as this proved to be.

Thank you to everyone who worked on this project, in whatever capacity.

Credits
Model: Giulia Donati
Art Director: Alessandro Renzi
Hair-Stylist: Mauro Jencinella + Staff
Make-Up Artist: Kleio Estetica e Benessere
Flowers Designer: Desiderio

The original article was written by the author in Italian and has been translated for the purpose of the MSoX website.