This latest series (now in the Gallery!) was quite an epic.  Emily Marilyn was one of the very first fetish models I became aware of when I first found the scene, so when she contacted me a few weeks ago asking if I would like to shoot her while she was in the UK, I naturally said yes.  Emily was also keen to shoot with Emma, so we spent some fun evenings thinking through what kind of a scene would do the occasion justice. 

We both settled on the idea that a sci-fi theme would be really different, and allow us to create some very dramatic images.  I had also wanted for ages to show someone 'emerging from a TV screen into the real world, so the idea for the series was born.  Emma also decided to make special latex outfits for the shoot, and spent countless hours planning and making what turned out to be really amazing costumes.

At the same time I was running around trying to find swords or laser rifles, a studio, and a makeup artist.  In the end the katana were loaned by the lovely Kezia Argue, and our MUA was the very talented Soo-Jung Park, with whom I've worked before. 

The shoot went very well indeed - Emily was completely lovely to work with, and indeed to hang out with afterwards!  Aside from a fire alarm that had everyone standing outside in the cold in their latex, and the studio being a bit cramped and disorganised (I won't be going back there!), it was a smooth day.  I took my Profoto lights along rather than use the ones at the studio, and this was the setup I used: 

You can see here a Profoto ProHead on a Pro-8a, shooting into a 6x4 gridded softbox camera left and in front of the models. A second ProHead is shooting into the 4x3 gridded softbox camera right and slightly behind the models.  There's a Profoto D1 into an Octabox on a boom above, to provide a little top lighting, but in the end I didn't need this much.  You can also see a fan on the floor, used to move hair and clothes to give that sense of dynamic action.

The Pro-8a is a ridiculously expensive piece of kit, but it really comes into its own in shoots and frees me up from waiting for the flash to recharge.  I can shoot up to 15 frames a second, with bang-on accuracy, so the first image here was shot as part of a sequence of the girls actually walking towards the camera.  For me, that gives a different look to a posed shot.

The real work for me, of course, was the post-production.  I've had a lot of requests for information about how the shots are put together, so this time I thought I would give you even more of a "behind the scenes" look at the Photoshop work.

The image on the left here is as it comes out of Nikon's Capure NX2 software, which I use for basic RAW processing, colour correction and any skin retouching (not that these two needed much!).  As you can see, the lighting is pretty much there in-camera. I do however like to use selective dodging and burning to create my distinctive, slightly painted look, with more contrast than you would normally see (I take the contrast out quite a bit, then put it back in, the way I like it :).  In the second image, you can see the highlights and shadows have been enhanced to give a more 3-D feeling.  (See Emily's legs, for example).

The next challenge is that for the crop I wanted, the swords were out of shot, so I cut out the arms and sword, from the elbow down, rotated them to be in the right position, and then blended the results back in.  You can still see the original arms here (on a separate 'layer' in Photoshop).

Next up is "cutting out" the models from the studio background (leaving transparent areas around them that the new background will show through), and this is where the fun really begins.  Hair is very hard to do well, and I really wished at this stage that I had shot against a grey background as that would have been closer to the final image.  As it was I often had to paint out by hand the tiny white halo around each strand of hair.  Fun!

In the second image here, you can see the models on the stock image (bought from BigStockPhoto if I remember correctly) that I chose to use as the basis of the background.  Finally on the right, I have changed the colour of the stock image, and masked out large sections of it, just to use the bits I want.  I have also cut out the window panes (made them fully transparent), and then painted back in a tiny bit of the original image to give the sense of reflections off the glass.

It's worth saying that I had experimented for several hours with rough versions of the models on a range of completely different backgrounds before I came up with this idea!  That experimentation is time consuming but if you're trying to come up with something like this, don't skip that step! 

Now you can see things start to come together.  On the left I add in a lovely photo of Seattle as the background (I went back and blurred this more after feedback on deviantArt).  The sky goes in next, with dodging and burning (painting on light and dark, basically), to create an even more dramatic look. 

Finally, on the right, I've corrected the colours of the models to match the background using a yellow filter... this is such an important step but it's one that many composites miss out.

This last image is the final shot.  The main difference here is that I have now added in the shadows, and it makes the whole piece far more believable.  At first I tried to create the shadows by hand, but struggled to get them looking realistic.  In the end I came up with a technique for using the actual shadows from the first image and overlaying them onto the new background.  This only works if you can neutralise the effect of the white floor in the process... tricky but well worth it!

I hope very much that you've found this interesting.  It's not really a tutorial as such, but I hope it gives you more of an insight into how this kind of image is created!  My thanks again to the lovely models and to Soo-Jung for the make-up and hair.  Enjoy the series!

Here's the latest shot to come out of the Feterati Girls fashion show in Montreal - and easily my most ambitious image to date! I actually had this image in mind as I was shooting the individual models, so lots of the action and direction was designed to create poses that would go together well, with the kind of energy I was looking for. This kind of shot does require a lot of planning, and I think it's a bit like acting against a green screen - you have to be able to imagine what the final image will look like!

Quite a few people have asked how whether this was shot in one go.  In fact it would be nearly impossible to get good lighting with such a large group, so I actually shot each model individually (although the two girls on the left were shot together), trying to keep the light as consistent as possible. Here's the lighting setup.  It was shot at Blah Blah studios in Montreal (yes, I live in London but seem to spend quite a bit of time in Montreal!)... with many thanks to Mario Bouchard, the owner of the studio.

The process of putting the final image together was pretty intense.  The rough steps were:

• Created a "rough cut" image, to help with selecting the right poses to use and building a pleasing composition.  (The first draft just looked like all the girls standing in a row - not good at all!)
• Processed each shot as an individual image, adjusting colour balance, exposure etc., as well as working on skin and contrast.  I then separated the model from the background - always a tricky process to get right! - so that I had a bunch of "playing pieces" to work with.
• Positioned and scaled each model within the composition so that it looked right.  Again, this was quite tricky as sometimes the "correct" scaling doesn't actually look right.  There's a sort of forced perspective going on here.
• Then matched the exposures & colour balance of each model
• Finally created inserted the other elements e.g. the bubbles (which I built from scratch in PS), shadows, the logo on the floor (the joys of the "screen" mode for layers!), the glitter ball etc.

Quite a project!  Hope you like the result - it's certainly a colourful spectacle and I really want to print it out huuuge :)

One of the images from the Feterati Girls fashion show has been generating quite a bit of interest: the paint fight between Honeyhair and Lauren Taylor.  The idea for this came from the very cool paint splatter skirt that Honeyhear was wearing (deisgned and made by the very talented Kimberlicious latex)... the photo should have paint being splattered in it!

The question that many peole have been asking is whether the paint in this shot was real, or not. 

Now... I have to say I'm pretty excited by that!  There's no finer complement to one's Photoshop work than to ask whether it exists at all :)  But I like to share my secrets, such as they are, so:

... drumroll ...

The paint was added back in London, in Photoshop. 

Reality as captured by a camera is often not as dynamic as the world we think we see, and for me Photoshop (and the other tools I use) is just a way to present the reality that's in my head :) So a real paint fight would have looked less real - or rather less hyper-real in the way I like - than this.  It would also have messed up Mario Bouchard's beautiful studio, which wouldn't have been a nice thing to do.

Here's the lighting setup.

This is the shot straight out of the camera.  You can see I had the idea in place and had even bought paintbrushes to use as props!

This is after correcting exposure, colour and working on skin a bit in Nikon Capture NX2.

And here, again, is the final image - this time in a larger size so you can see a bit more detail.  You can get an idea from the progression between the shots of how my "hyper-real" look on the models starts with the lighting but is developed using a lot of selective dodging and burning, luminosity mapping etc.

The paint splatters in the air actually came from a range of 3D paint splashes from a free online library.  I used many of these and combined them to get the effect that I wanted.  Essentially I cut each splash out of the image it was in (Photoshop lets you create distinct objects on different layers that you can then move around and work on), and bent/twisted them to do what I wanted (follow a trajectory, fit the paint brush, etc.).  Then I lightened the edges to match the lighting in the main shot, and then finally changed their colour, saturation etc. to fit each other and the effect I wanted in the image.  It probably took a good 4 hours in total.

The splatters on the floor were sample photoshop brushes I had collected along the way.  One click on the floor, then flatten them to give perspective, change blending mode so they look part of the scene rather than dropped on... then a layer mask to allow the paint to go under the shoes and even be seen through the transparent shoes.

So there you go!  Hope it's interesting :)  Let me know if you'd like more of this kind of post...

As you may have noticed, Emma and I travel to quite a few events in North America, and one of our annual pilgramages is to the Montreal Fetish Weekend, every September. 

This year, Emma and her Feterati Girls had a big slot in the fashion show with their latex designs, and also performed a very cool UV dance routine at the main event on Saturday night.

For the fashion show, there were a total of 17 models to get ready and rehearse!  I hired Blah Blah studios in Montreal for the afternoon before the fashion show, so that we had a place away from the hubbub to get the girls made up, and so that I could shoot them as well - partly as a thank you to the girls, partly for the Feterati Girls publicity, and partly because... well, how often do you get to shoot 17 models in one go!  Especially when they include people like Jean Bardot :)

It was an incredible day - I don't think I've ever been that tired before - 17 shoots in something like 5 hours really takes it out of you.  But the results have been fantastic - I'm still processing the images but have started uploading them to a gallery on this site as well as my facebook, DeviantArt etc. pages. 

Here are a few samples!

I have recently been on a major purchasing spree, upgrading all my studio and location lighting gear to Profoto.  Profoto is amazing in so many ways... but re-equipping was as expensive as a new luxury car (and not a small one either!).  To help fund this I'm selling my existing studio kit and a few other items of kit.  This kit has created some great images, and six heads give you some fantastic flexibility with lighting.  The equipment ranges from new to around 3 years old, and has been very well looked after.  Here's the lighting equipment:

Lumen8 Kit F400: 6 heads (one needs a new flashbulb), 4 stands, 6 reflectors, 6 power cables, 2 2x2' Lastolite pro softboxes, 2 umbrellas, 4 sync cables, 2 bags
2 x Lastolite softgrid set for the 2x2 softboxes 
Bowens softlite reflector (beauty dish) with diffuser
Bowens barn doors/gel holder
Bowens Maxlite refelector with grid set 
2 x Lastolite snoot and grid ends 
Bowens 65 degree Maxlite reflector

All this new would be around £2150.  I'm asking £950 (as is - buyer collects).  Please drop me an email if interested!  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Other equipment for sale due to upgrade - also used extremely carefully - includes:

Nikon D300 with lens 18-200 f3.5-5.6 VR with UV filter, circular polarising filter, Lowepro slingshot bag and spare battery: £995
Seculine TwinLink wireless flash trigger (one transmitter and four receivers): £230
Manfrotto tripod head 460MG: £60
Sekonic L-308s lightmeter: £60

I'll add images of these when I get a chance!

Emma and I had an amazing trip to the Maldives a couple of years ago that had a real impact on my photography (and indeed our ability to travel anywhere less beautiful :)  So in December last year we set out again for those tiny little islands, carrying just a few pairs of shorts and t-shirts, some Lady Lucie latex and... about 50kg of camera and lighting equipment. 

This time the weather wasn't as kind to us; it rained for 11 of our 14 days - but when the sun finally came out, we took the opportunity to shoot some images that are still making me feel warm several weeks later :)

The main innovation this trip was using two flash heads synched together and firing into a shoot-through umbrella to create more light, allowing me to overpower the sun more easily.  The strobes are fired in manual mode, and I used about 1/2 power on each so that I could shoot more quickly (shooting on full power means that the recycle time is too long).  Heat is an issue while doing this, of course... especially in the hot sun!

I tended to use this as the key light, generally to the model's front and side.  A further strobe into a small softbox provided a cross-light, though the sun often played that role as well.

You'll also notice in a few of these that I've included a couple of Emma's favourite creatures from the island - one of them "dressed up" in Lady Lucie's latex (courtesy of Photoshop of course!  No hermit crabs were harmed in the course of filming...).  There is another one of a heron biting Emma's bum, but you'll have to ask nicely for that one lol.

The fish is a trigger fish - one of the ones that we fed just outside our villa in 2008 (in fact I used a photo from back then to create this little chap). 

And finally here's a behind-the-scenes photo of Emma and some of the camera kit hiding from the rain that interrupted the shoot! 

See the full set in the Gallery, but I hope you enjoy these in the meantime!