I tried to photograph the baby chickens the same way I photograph people.

Chicken #1: “Free me from this prison.”

Chicken #2: “Who am I?”

Chicken #3: “I’m a poser.”

My eyes are exploding from cuteness!

What really set the atmosphere of amusement was hearing the squeals of pre-teen girls coming from the back of the cinema when Robert Pattinson (playing the part of Edward Cullen) came on screen. Sadly, noone showed Taylor Lautner (as Jacob Black) any love, but it wasn’t a huge surprise given the dorky hair extensions they put on him, proving that long hair just doesn’t suit some guys. Apparently, he’s getting replaced for the next movie.

Anyway, I digress. Last Saturday we got together again to do a Twilight cosplay in honour of the hilarity of the film. We had a lot of laughs. The photographs turned out way better than expected and now we’re not sure whether or not we are genuine fans of the franchise…

Credits

Photography & Postwork: Sabrina Wong
Edward Cullen: Alyssea
Bella Swan: Amelia
Jacob Black: Christine

I wasn’t involved in makeup, putting costumes and wigs together – these guys are amazing and put it together themselves :) Shoot direction was a joint effort between all of us.

Characters property of Stephanie Meyer.

Have you seen Twilight? What’s your take on the film? What do you think of our cosplay photographs? I’d love to know :)

The concept was to shoot a series of photos in Skye’s lolita outfits, with the idea of taking photos of a lolita doing ordinary day to day activities such as waking up, going to the bookstore, going to get coffee, and catching public transport, a sort of “day in the life of a doll”. “La vie d’une Poupée” means “The Life of a Doll” in French.

Our first shoot was on 6th March 2008 and the last was almost 6 months later on the 24th August 2008. We got to know each other quite well during this time, discovering that we had mutual friends (being Perthed) and our adventures together provided many laughs. It was not only our personal connection developing, during that time Skye and I developed our skills in modelling and photography (respectively) pretty significantly – Can you guess which sets of photos were taken first and last?

Credits

Model, Styling & Makeup: Princess Skye
Photography, Postwork, Direction: Sabrina Wong

Photography Notes

I actually wanted this to look like a Vogue editorial but I’m happy with the different way it turned out given my inexperience at the time. In terms of lighting, I used only available light, in some cases adding a reflector (many thanks Kien for holding the reflector!). In terms of composition, the photographs turned out more like portraits than fashion shots. I should have used more wider shots to soak up more of the full outfit, environment and atmosphere of where we were shooting.

Using blurb.com, I designed a photobook of these photographs as a belated present for Skye’s Birthday. I used the Landscape Hardcover book with ImageWrap and am very happy with the quality. If you’re catching up with me and want to have a look, let me know. I have my own copy and would be happy to show it to you!

Hope you like the set, which photos are your favourite?

The symbol of the paper crane originates from the story of Sadako, a girl living in Hiroshima at the time of the nuclear bombing who developed leukemia from the effects of the radiation. There was a rumour that if one could fold 1000 paper cranes, one’s wish would be granted. Having being diagnosed with only one year of life left, Sadako’s wish was to live. She started folding cranes out of anything she could find in the hospital such as medical wrappings, she even asked other patients if she could use their get well present wrappings to make her cranes. Sadako made 644 paper cranes before she become too weak to fold any more and soon after, she died.

Bloodied paper cranes are a confronting symbol, used here to represent the people who died and those who are still alive today, suffering from the effects of the nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had only around 50 paper cranes, folded by hand over two weekends and a few of them were made by my partner in crime. I dipped them in red food colouring to simulate the bloody look. I don’t have any pictures of this process because I had red stuff all over my hands.

Here’s a closeup of the eye makeup we used for the shoot, crafted by the skillful Jane Wong:

Haylee C was fantastic to work with, she was very friendly, looked graceful and had very natural flow about her, I would love to work with her again. (I always say that, but it’s true!)

Many thanks go to Adam for allowing me to use his garage for this setup. We had to jump start the cars sleeping in the garage to make space for the shoot. Unfortunately, Adam wasn’t around for the shoot as he had something on, but left me in his backyard with his garage door remote. The set came together nicely with the rough brown material backdrop and the blood stained paper cranes. I hung the cranes using string and wooden dowels I found at Bunnings, taped securely to the backdrop stand. Here’s a blurry picure of the backdrop / set I constructed in his garage for the shoot:

I used a pilot’s helmet and goggles to make the central person of the photoshoot look like a pilot, representing one of the pilots of the aircrafts that flew the nuclear bombs from the US into Japan. I directed Haylee to look upset, remorseful and angry over what had happened. There will be final, polished photographs coming later but here is one preview:

A couple of outtakes we took for fun at the end:

I hope this shoot does not offend anyone, it was intended to raise awareness of what happened at the end of World War II and pay respects to those to lost their lives and developed illnesses due to the bombings and effects of the radiation .

Image 1: “Intensity”

To be fair, I gave her direction to look angry on this shot and that is why she looks so aggressive before retouching. I made some minor adjustments to face orientation and eye size to get this image looking the way I wanted it to. The aim was to ease up the amount of anger that was emanating from the picture, but still keep it as a strong look.

Image 2: “Freshness”

I loved this image straight from the camera, so I just made some adjustments to the right shoulder.

Image 3: “In the hood”

No image manipulations on this one, just some colour / contrast adjustment to make it look edgier, like an urban music artist promo shot.

Hope you enjoyed these!

There wasn’t a lot of notice and a couple of the studios I checked out were booked, so we chose Chantelle’s house as the location. We shot these images in a small space in her loungeroom, amongst all the sofa chairs, against a plain light blue-coloured wall. Much to my amusement, her mother came in and gave me some strange looks at one point during the shoot.

Chantelle was a delight to work with. She was eager to follow direction, help out with styling ideas and looked just as stunning in person as she does in her photographs. Her boyfriend was around helping me out with the reflector, he was very quiet and easy to work with too.

Chantelle picked out two outfits for us to use from her wardrobe. The first was a brown strapless elasticated dress and the second was a two-piece outfit, consisting of her father’s white singlet and her mother’s vintage shorts. The latter was my favourite, really bringing out the youth and freshness in Chantelle’s look. In terms of hair styling, we went with a messy hair look in some photos, achieved with just a few hair clips, pulling some bits out. Later on, I did a sidebraid and placed a massive peachy-pink silk rose on the side of her head, which I purchased in David Jones a couple of months ago, on a whim!

Chantelle James can be found on Model Mayhem and is represented by Xtreem Model Management, there are some amazing pictures of her by Gary Sandford on her profile, you’ve got to go have a look at those :)

My next post shows you a few before and after retouching comparisons so you can see what difference my post processing has made to the original pictures.

I was inspired to try this after watching this video/parody of “How To Create an Amy Winehouse Beehive“. Another great video that I watched was “Super Easy Beehive Hairstyle“. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the hair going up, perhaps next time – if Skye will let me do it again!

Reports from Skye indicate that it took 3 people to take this hairstyle out. I had to zip off to another photoshoot and wasn’t around to help deconstruct it. I can imagine it would have been a bit of a nightmare with the amount of teasing and hairspray that went into it to get the required volume. Thank you for letting me experiment on your hair, Skye!

Here’s a closeup shot of the hair:

Instructions

If you’re interested, the beehive hairstyle involved these 3 basic stages:

1. Put all the hair into hot rollers, sectioning the hair in a strip down the middle and then doing the sides afterwards. Ensure hot rollers and rolled inwards toward the center point. Leave hot rollers for about 25 minutes.

2. Remove central hot roller from top of the head, tease and then spray with hairspray. Thread hair into toilet roll and secure with bobby pins.

3. Working from the middle outwards, undo hot rollers one by one, teasing & spraying them with hairspray and then securing them to the toilet roll / rest of the hair, so that none of the toilet roll is visible.

My beehive was a bit messy on the outside due to my inexperience. There were a few dents where I tried to pin the hair into the pile and it left a dent. Skye had the great idea of covering it with ribbon and flowers, so you can’t see the dents in these photos :)

I’m taking a casual interest in hair styling, if anyone has any interesting links/videos showing how to do various styles, please share them in the comments :) Thanks!

Here is a full length shot of the outfit and backdrop.

One portrait-style photograph:

Go to my flickr account to see the rest, there’s quite a few more over there :)

Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabbiesab/sets/72157607778018967/

Here is the custom design that my partner in crime helped me to carve out using corn cob stabby things, a cheap knife and a miniature saw from the pumpkin carving kit.

Quickly testing out how it would look with a light inside.

With a candle inside the pumpkin.

We used 1.5 kg of pumpkin to make pumpkin soup for dinner: there were twelve of us.

Here’s a pumpkin carved by Kien, Sena is sitting in the background with his creation.

Everyone’s pumpkins were still there in the morning!

Hope you guys had a fun Halloween last weekend too!

The exhibition is still on if you’re interested, check out the details on the Candy Cult website. I would highly recommend it!