I’ve been wanting to do some stylized shoots for some time now, and one area I really wanted to look into doing was a cosplay shoot, or even not full on costume but inspired-by. This is my first of a series I’m going to be doing. When brainstorming what to do, I knew I had a group of friends that had some pretty awesome costumes, but I also wanted to have a session where it’s not so obvious what the character is, so for the first one I decided to do a Red Riding Hood inspired shoot. We’ve got the cloak, but that’s it. I know, that’s pretty obvious that it’s red riding hood, but I also wanted to get some perspective of this character without the cloak. One of our previous seniors, Ashten, modeled as our red riding hood inspired character. As I mentioned we wanted to get some shots without the cloak, and we started with those first as the cloak material produced some crazy static, and static and hair don’t mix well together. The location is an interesting one. I’ve been wanting to do a session in the wooded area in our backyard for some time now, and with the leaves gone and the time of day we shot at, we were able to produce some pretty dramatic looking images.
Starting with the indoor studio pictures, this is something that’s a little newer to me. I’ve done studio shots before but this time I wanted to push myself, studio pictures are something I know are in my future and anytime I do something I want to do it right, so during Ashten’s session we spent the beginning portion of it experimenting. We just did a white background for headshots and after some those, we spent the time creating pictures with a black backdrop for our red riding hood images. For these pictures, the intention was to photoshop her into a different background to create an art piece rather than simply an image. Granted, what we did here is not how studio pictures will go very often in the future. Since this was such a creative stylized session, the backgrounds consisted of things that either 1. Do not exist or 2. Are not options for me to shoot around here, at least at this given time with it being Winter. I say some of them don’t exist because I manipulated them in a way to work just for the picture. This wasn’t just a time to take some pictures for me, but rather a time to expand my photoshopping abilities as a lot of this is editing that I’ve not done before, but for a stylized shoot, I had to have a little fun with the editing. I’m pretty thrilled with the way they turned out. After our indoor session, we made the trek into our backyard where we created some on location images. This is where I thrive. I love outdoor portraits and adjusting the light to my liking. I’m so happy with the way they turned out. This is just part 1 of my inspired series. I have a few more in the works and can’t wait to produce some more images.
