When looking into hair and beauty photography it became clear very quickly that the more radical alternative hair and beauty shoots were right up my street. After looking into Rankin a fair amount it is also clear that I admire his work and take huge amounts of influence from it. I looked into some of his hair and beauty work and loved how he plays with bold shapes, colour and statements. I wanted to create an extreme close up graphic beauty image that was hard hitting eye catching.
 |  |
Concept:
The idea here was to creative an artistic beauty shot that remained extremely bold and hard hitting. I didn't want to make something conventional or commercial but something experimental and alternative which is becoming a running theme throughout my work. I was looking at creating an almost black and white response to the colour hair and beauty shots I had planned based on the idea of safari and wild animal instinct. This is where the emerging from black idea came into its own, the model was shot as if a stealthy bush baby peeking through the trees with a deadly gaze. I loved the almost foreign animal aspects I had been toying with and so decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
Execution:
For this shot I set up a single 400 watt flash strobe hitting the models face square on, attached to this was a small beauty dish and spun to soften the light and provide a nice even layer of light over the face. I played around with the f/ on the flash until it brought out enough of the facial features and shadow whilst still retaining the black background and face. This flash strobe was hitting against the black backdrop which then sucked in any excess light blending the model into the backdrop itself. I shot at 100 ISO f/9 and 160 shutter speed, this allowed me enough focal length to pick up all the detail across the face, keeping it all really sharp at 100 ISO.
Hair and Makeup:
It is evident with a lot of Rankin's work that the budget is fairly lenient and his team are high quality professionals and so to produce a beauty image of this calibre with a student budget and no access to a professional team would be a trying task. To realistically plan for a shoot like this i had to take into account the hair, makeup and background and in turn how this would all work as a collective. I wanted an extreme close up shot to really get the graphic detail I was looking for and so the hair wouldn't play much of a part in the final frame. I decided to prepare for this by tying the hair back out of face completely, making the retouch easier and also giving me more creative freedom with it.
It quickly became evident that this shot would rely on the makeup to create the impact. I took heavy influence from Rankin's shot on the right for the makeup. I found the way the human form looks when blacked up really interesting, suddenly the lighting is transformed into something much deeper and dramatic, the facial features appear more bold and almost alien to me and the overall aesthetic creates a conflict within as I try to decipher what I am looking at. All these factors together helped me to visualise the final frame I wanted which made it much easier to work towards. I had brought a black colourama for my FYP shoots and so using this worked really well with the black makeup as I could literally colour in and burn around the parts of the face I wanted to remain visible. It allowed me to seamlessly blend the background into the face as though it was emerging from the black beneath creating exactly the effect I wanted.
The lip and eye pieces were chosen in response to the animalistic venture i was taking, I was searching for pieces that could work online and when I came across the zebra print lip i knew it was exactly the right thing for the shot. I needed items that would jump out of the black on the face and really cut up the composition of the image into something more artistic. After searching more for something to bring it all together I found the white eye lashes made of feathers. Not only did this in keep with the animalistic features I wanted to bring in but it also provided a solid defined shape in a bold white colour which brought everything together to work as one.
