Danyella Angel was gorgeous in the leopard print top, black dress and makeup by Kym Davidson. A special thanks to Mika of  The Studio By Mika Does Makeup for hosting us during the makeup and hair styling!

It was a pleasure to work with such talented people. We were also fortunate to have a beautiful Spring day – a rarity in April in rainy Vancouver!

Harajuku fashion originates from Japan and gets its name from the Harajuku station in Tokyo, which is popular place to find many types of street styles, collectively called Harajuku fashion. The styles usually include colourful and crazy hairstyles, makeup and outfits.

For this shoot, I teamed up with makeup artist Mika, stylist JoAnna Keller and model Laurel. We had a lot of fun with the creative makeup and styling as you can see in photos below!

Check out Part 1:  Ganguro Fashion Shoot.

Here are some of the photos:

I’d love to spend some more time shooting Stephanie with the LED hoop – as well as the fire eating & spinning – maybe this summer!

Maggie wanted to surprise her boyfriend with some boudoir photos for Valentine’s Day! She started the shoot getting gorgeous makeup done by Mika of MikaDoesMakeup at Mika’s beautiful studio.

Here are some photos from the shoot – I couldn’t blog them before Valentine’s Day or it would potentially spoil the surprise! Maggie brought a couple bags of rose petals, which was a really great idea. Maggie and Mika had lot of fun throwing the petals around (and strategically placing them on Maggie). It definitely had an American Beauty look. Maggie had a great time and loved her photos – as did her boyfirend, I’m sure

I never know whether Danyella will have blond or black hair because she seems to alternate between both looks quite frequently! Either way, she is exceptionally pretty and with her brains and ambition, I am sure she will be very successful.

We did the shoot at the Studio by MikaDoesMakeup, which is a gorgeous location and wonderfully decorated. I found a parking spot close by, which was a challenge in downtown Vancouver, and brought my gear and set up, while Danyella was getting her hair and makeup done by the fabulous Mika (Mika Does Makeup) and Faye (Faye Smith Makeup and Hair Artist).

I started with the headshots against a black damask curtain, which contrasted nicely with Danyella’s blond hair. After that, we did the rest of the shoot in the massage area of the studio. I was inspired by the sheer fabric curtains, which combined with Danyella’s modeling and the great hair and makeup, made for some great shots.

Here’s a selection of the photos from the shoot:

Shadows are as interesting as the light. Chiaroscuro is a term used in photography, as well as cinema and painting, that literally means “light-dark” and originates from the Italian Renaissance. The shadows help define the image, making the two dimensional appear three dimensional.

The idea for this shoot was to have the model, Saori, emerging into the light from the shadows. To get that effect, I used a black seamless background, making sure that the key light did not spill onto it by keeping them well-separated. I started with a large gridded softbox close to Saori, on camera right to light the portraits and close-ups, highlighting Julia’s makeup work. By moving the softbox in very close, the light falls off quickly so the opposite side of her face is quite a bit darker than the side with the light. To control the shadow’s darkness I used a large white foamcore panel and a silver disk reflector for fill light.

For the full body shots, I really wanted to get the shadowy look, so I used a more focused light – a gridded strobe on a boom in front and above Saori. For an interesting background, I put a fog machine and another strobe to backlight the smoke/fog behind Saori. For some of the shots, I used a blue gel on the strobe to make a blue smoke effect. With this set-up, Saori’s face was well lit and her body gradually became darker, fading into blackness.

Post-processing was done with Lightroom 3.3 and Photoshop CS5.

Credits:
Inspired modelling by Saori Sloan
Beautiful peacock themed makeup by Julia Lockley

I have since stopped tethering whenever possible, mainly because I do not like the restriction of being attached by the USB cable during a shoot. There are also a few other reasons for not tethering. I had an incident with my E-510 when it was tethered. I stepped on the cable when it was attached to the camera and the force bent the pins of the camera’s USB socket, rendering it unusable. The same socket is also used for downloading images from the camera, and for operation of the remote control. I could have it repaired, although the expense is probably not worth it because the E-510 is an older camera body.

I now own an E-30, which also has a similar USB socket and must use Olympus Studio 2 for the Mac for tethering. I don’t want to risk damaging the body, so will only tether using something like the JerkStopper or other device to protect the camera.

Another problem that I encountered with Olympus Studio 2 was software crashes. During nearly every shoot, at least once Olympus Studio 2 would freeze and only work again after rebooting my Mac. As a Mac user I rarely encounter this situation — normally it’s easy to force quit and restart the application without rebooting. Rebooting and initializing everything takes some time, and is not good during a studio shoot with clients and models on set! I generally take a break to sort it out, but it does waste valuable studio and talent time, and stops the flow of the shoot.

Olympus Studio 2 has a great time lapse feature, however, I recently discovered that time lapse does not work with Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or OS 10.7 (Lion). It does work with 10.5 (Leopard). I checked with Olympus customer support, and they responded:

Unfortunately the Time Lapse function in the Mac version of Olympus Studio 2.3 no longer functions. This occurred after an APPLE OS update awhile back. But because Studio is officially discontinued there is no patch to address this.

Time lapse is not built into my camera, but I can do time lapses with an intervalometer, or using a clever hack with an eraser and rubber band!

There is a big need for better tethering support for Olympus E-System cameras for Mac users. According to the forums that I’ve read, it would require Olympus to licence the software development kit (SDK) to third-party developers which they have done for Windows but not for Mac. That could allow the Olympus camera tethering with other applications such as Lightroom or Capture One. But at this time that does not seem to be likely.

Here are some photos of model Kristy with ganguro makeup by Mika Does Makeup. The outfits were provided by stylist Joanna Keller. Kristy was perfect for the shoot and is very familiar with the Harajuku fashion scene. The makeup was also perfect and the outfits put together by Joanna were great. The shoot was a lot of fun!

We did a couple more Harajuku inspired looks, which I will post soon!

If you are interested in trying the ganguro look, here is a very good tutorial on YouTube:

For more more information about Ganguro, check out the always informative Wikipedia!

The event was limited to 24 photographers, so we were split into 4 groups and spent some time with each couple. We had 2 indoor sets where we took advantage of the studio’s cool backgrounds and beautiful natural light. We also had 2 outdoor shoots where we used strobes as well as the natural light. It was a cloudy, cool day but there was some nice light later in the day. It was pretty cold for the models, but they did a great job and were a lot of fun to work with.

Thanks to Jason Ho and Derek Cheng (Pure White Studios), Dan and Kat Stone (Stone Photo), and Chris and Gina Chong (Butter Studios) for organizing the event and for providing excellent tips and advice during the shoot. This was the first time for this event and it went very smoothly. I’m hoping there will be another one soon!

Here are some more blogs with photos by some of the other photographers who attended the shootout. It’s interesting to see the styles of the different photographers who were photographing the same models under the same conditions.

Cecilia Flaming Photography

Denise Lin Photography

C. Williams Photography

Vivid Moments Photography

Aaron Aubrey Photography