Big Bear / Little Bear shoot

Had a great time the other evening doing a photo shoot with Sophie Clifford.  I have had a massive bear that I won at a charity ball a few years back and it's been sitting under my son's bunk bed. So I thought it would be fun to include it in a shoot.   I got it touch with Sophie to see if she fancied working together and she came over to Spitfire Studio for a couple of hours to do some images.

We started off with just a basic lighting setup with a big octo soft box and a straight strobe on the background and took most the bear shots like that.  We then switched off the front lighting to get a few back lit semi-silhouette images. Then in post I turned these into pure silhouettes by push the whites whiter and taking the rest of the tones to black.

We then moved on to using the beauty dish to give a bit more structured lighting and to take a few more with slightly more direct lighting back against the studio wall.  We then finished off the session by wrapping some shinny cerise fabric around Sophie and just pinning it round the back with some clips to give her a new dress.  The effect worked well and I shall look to use it with some other materials on other shoots. The light setup for these used 4 lights.  The main is the beauty dish off to camera right, the large octobox was placed at the back of the studio behind camera to provide some fill.  Then two gridded strobes with barndoors both left and right placed behind Sophie to get a touch of rim light and also catch the shiny material to make it shine.

I still have some additional photos to edit so will be adding to the gallery over the next few days.