Shadow angel

It's been a while since I wrote my last blog here, so high time for another behind the scenes talk about a shoot I did a little while with the lovely Teresa DuMore: Shadow Angel.

The origins of this shoot start quite some time back during a round of mindless zapping around the available TV channels and at some point I got into the adult channels such as Playboy TV and such and within that section I set eyes upon Teresa for the first time and her marvellous back tattoo and I told myself that if given the chance I would do something with those wings.

Then fast forward time a few months. Teresa isnt the first model from the adult industry that I've worked with. About a year ago I worked on my Decadence project with Foxxy Angel. And as it turned out to be: Foxxy and Teresa are friends and by posting the decadence shoot on Twitter I gained a new follower giving me the oppurtunity to get in touch with Teresa. So I did.

Some messages were sent back and forth and I created a moodboard with what I sort of had in mind and a few months later we were discussing this moodboard over a cup of tea at cafe in her hometown and my city of birth which immediately broke whatever ice there might have been. Also, the moodboard was a big factor for Teresa in deciding to work and meet with me. So I would say to other photographers: use moodboards! They rock!

A little time passed again with me working on my concepts such as goddesses and 'the outsider' (for my masterclass with Hanneke Meier) and entering in a photo contest for Playboy Netherlands and working out a storyboard for this shoot. Funnily enough the idea to do a storyboard originated from the masterclass I was working on simultaneously.

Eventually we found a date at the end of april for our shoot and I enlisted the help of a good friend, La Dutchessa, to help out in the Make up department. And after some train-troubles I had my place filled with a fun and relaxed atmosphere preparing for the shoot.

Time flew by as shots from the storyboard were translated into rough photographs against a white wall to be replaced in photoshop later and we managed to sneak in some extra shots for a new tradition I started that weekend involving an awesome chair I bought for shoots but end up never using because of space constraints. So now I use the chair as a prop for an extra shot to make one big collection of models I've worked with.

After shooting it's time for editing. I first created masked backgrounds using a random forest picture I plucked off the web to create some mood straight away.. and I then had a choice, photorealism or not. I knew I could do a fairly photorealistic forest from scratch in photoshop using materials from my archive and a little stock. But I decided to take a different route using lots of different brushes and elements to create my spooky forest. And in the end I'm very pleased with that.

And that kind of wraps up the story behind this shoot, my second one with a model from the adult-industry, but that's not something that bothers me in the slightest way, as with most people from a public business (say musicians and rock stars), they are just people. Making a living doing something different from the larger part of society, but as for the rest, we're not all that different no matter what we earn our money with and Teresa and I had a lot of fun preparing and working on this shoot. And one of the steps in the preparation process is now leading to a second shoot with Foxxy and I'm not minding one bit. My photography is still me and I'm not shooting porn all of a sudden because of it.

So, without anything else to add I'm leaving it to the pictures. The first one is in the blog which then links to the full gallery.

Shadow Angel - the full set.