The weekend just gone I got to shoot with a local model who used to be part of the Suicide girls team. She hadn't done any gel work before and was super keen to experiment with it!

Before our shoot, I had made a Pinterest board with literally just 5 ideas on (Usually I'd pin about 20), with the idea that these would be great places to start and build upon. We ended up going with about 4 full setups within 2 hours, and had a little intentional camera movement and shutter drags with a couple of set ups too. I'm trying to get away from cramming as much into shoots recently, however, these turned out pretty well!

I'm going to share with you one of those images, give you the gelled lighting diagram for it, and break the shot down too.

Firstly, I knew I wanted to use my Pixapro Octabox 150 as a background. My Viltrox 75mm usually works great combined with the Octabox 150 as a background down to compression, but the studio doesn't have the most amount of space (I think its around 6m x 4m or 5m), so my 75mm Viltrox would only be good for super tight portraits, basically headshots. Ashena (the model) also had a really cool red latex top and leg harness that I wanted to get in frame too. Basically, the 56mm was the only compromise I  had. I had my back fully to the wall and Ashena about half a foot from the softbox.

For lighting I used my Godox AD300 with a magenta gel in the Octa 150 on around 1/64th or 128th power. That gave a nice dark magenta, with a little wrap around on Ashena. But at such a low power the creases on the front diffuser shows up. To counter this we'd usually up the power and blow out the detail. However, it's the opposite to what I wanted to achieve. I just knew there would be extra post processing to do.

The key light was just an Godox AD200 with a blue gel fired into a white umbrella and placed close to Ashena, also at a low power. I think I under exposed this by about a stop to preserve skin detail. I knew I'd have to bring the exposure up in post on the blues too. At a higher power the skin just seemed to lose all detail.

Essentially that's all there is with setup. Both really low power, shot at f2.8. with lights placed as close to the model as possible.

Post processing, I pulled the magentas down in luminace even more and tweaked their colour to be more.. magenta. Blues was similar. I increased the shadows, pushed the blues towards a darker hue, and dropped it's luminance. Then moved to photoshop where I had to fill the spaces around the frame the softbox wasn't big enough to fill, crop in slightly too, then basic retouching and colour grading.

The images that came from this set, in my opinion, just screams out of the screen. The neon pink demands attention, is borderline asbo worthy, and I love it!