Time just vanishes when you're an adult doesn't it! It's already been a week since I travelled to Staffordshire to shoot at a new location called Basfordhurst cottage with the incredible @Kateymodel (her instagram tag).  We've shot multiple times and for this shoot Katey had a Helmut Newton shot as inspiration, which I absolutely loved!

With this image as inspiration, I ordered a big bottle of hydrogen peroxide as a prop, plastic dust sheets so fake blood doesn't get on the floor, and some super absorbant kitchen roll as an extra layer of story telling. Kinda like we're post cleanup.

As you can see, the original shot is very bright and has a clean feel to it (if that makes sense). Basford has a beautiful bathroom and since being open to people to shoot, I've seen alot of people using the bathroom, also with a bright and clean feel to their images. I wanted a slightly different feel. I wanted the darkness, but also gelled, and clean vibe to it all. That vibe fits in more with my style and also gets our shots to stand out that little bit further from others that go with the bright vibe.

The bathroom is a decent size, but was narrow enough that my 23mm (Fuji XH2 so around 35mm full frame) was still too long to get the whole scene in shot. I brielf tried my kit lens at 18mm but wasn't liking the look much at all. After a little debating, I stuck with the 23mm Viltrox and knew I had to be more purposeful with compostion. I wasn't going to be able to get our beautiful electircal tape outline fully in shot. Instead, I had to be concious of not just getting the head in, or a random piece of arm as that would be non contextual. Like, why is there a random circle of black on the floor?!

I briefly experimented with light placements and modifiers, before settling on 2 AD200s, one with a blue gel and umbrella firing into the wall for a blue wash, placed to camera left, and the second with a red gel and Rogue snoot placed behinf Katey and camera right. I had both grid in to make a really tight spot of light subtly raking across the wall behind. The third light was a Godox AD300 firing into another small white umbrella also to camera left.It was still relatively bright outside but the windows were covered so exposure was set to 250th to kill most ambient, besides the brightest highlights.

With this whole shoot I wanted to emphasise the story telling aspect. On the window was a sign that said "All you need is love", which we intentionally kept in for some of the shots. We also opened the windows, as you would if you had cleaned a room with hydrogen peroxide and wanted the smell to escape.

The vibe of the shoot gave us a little more freedom to get weirder too with posing. We could use lower angle and janky poses to give more of a unhinged feel to the character Katey played. Basically housewife who just snapped and killed her rich husband. To which, she smashed it! Katey's posing was just incredible. I got so many shots that I loved it was hard to choose!

Editing was pretty simple too, a few basic adjustments in Capture one to brighten and flatten the exposure and darken the blues (I like a slightly brighter and flatter shot to take into photoshop before I darken everything again), then basic clean up (Katey requires very little editing), tidying the tape man, and colour grading.

In all this was a super fun shoot that didn't require too much in the way of set up, just needed a great location, a few props and an incredible model to pull of. These kinds of location shots are ones I want to do alot more of going forward!