So we put together the first shot of the Alone series in the studio. The series strives to find women in an exposed situation, that has the potential for eroticism (and I’m sure has been), but is grounded in the honesty of the scene to push it past titillation and to a very human place. This narrative entailed a young waitress just home from work on a hot, wet night. She would be in a state of undress, halted only by how worn down she was from the day. These served as the basics, and we fleshed out the concept from there.
Laura Meyers was traveling through town and her schedule would work with our availability. We have another project (not yet finished posting) that we enjoyed working with her, and she seemed to encompass the young persona that we were after. Plus she has zero level of discomfort being exposed and we felt that was important for the premise of this series to find it’s honesty.
As always with us, color combinations are quite important. Stacey went shopping for wardrobe at ACT and came up with a yellow-ocher polyester waitress jumper that seemed perfect. To make that pop, she mixed a deep cyan color for the walls, and then distressed them for a grimy look. We saw the room now developing into more of a Day Hotel feel — stark, mismatched, dirty. We scrounged up a table, small bed, a suitcase full of odd clothes and some odds ‘n’ ends to flesh it out.
The colors also helped to pick the color of her eye shadow and lips to help them pop. Daryn did a great job of applying a great make up job and then smearing it to hell and back. But we fell down on the wardrobe a bit as we were after a sheer bra. We wanted to show that she felt good about her own body, even as it was shroud in a gunny sack, and it would expose her a bit more. Unfortunately, communication and time worked against us, but a luck would have it, Laura had a nice looking red bra that would accomplish the same task, and the color would pop out as the third compliment.
For lighting, I had prepped a 12x silk to shoot through with a magnum reflector so that it could both come in through the window and wrap the key around her face for a very beautiful key. I split the 12x so half was behind the set and half was in front. As for color temp, I wanted to augment the cyan and yellow with some real splash. Stacey and I had talked about a light behind her to giver her a back rim. We settled on a sconce as it both lends an awkward permanency to the room cementing our setting and could be place on the wall behind her and not directly behind her head. I used a full straw gel on the sconce-motivated light to give it real splash. I put a full CTB on the magnum to increase the color separation between the two and picked a color temp on the camera of 5000K. Post was mostly push and pull of light, clean up some extra bits in the corners and bob’s your uncle.
We were quite pleased with the results of the shoot, and look forward to exploring more in this series. I can’t say that they will all have this color, but for sure they will have the rawness of the resulting image.
