Chisa's Boudoir Shoot

At the beginning of the year I purchased a couple of Creative Live courses by Sue Bryce and Jen Rozenbaum.  Both photographers have developed successful Boudoir businesses and they tend to shoot with natural light.   I decided to try some of their techniques of lighting and posing.
I asked Chisa to be the model, we had chatted about doing a shoot for a couple of years so this was the perfect opportunity as she wanted to do something with a sexy edge.  I put out a casting call for an MUA and Marcia offered to help out.




Model:  Chisa Philpott
MUA:  Marcia Adiutori (MAC)
Assistant: Jonathan Sousa (Reflector holder)

Technical Info:
We shot in a room at the Hamilton Princess, the room was facing south west and the shoot was in the morning so there wasnt a lot of natural light coming into the room.  As I wanted a lot of the images to be back lit, those images had to be shot at a high ISO, in the 1600 range.   Even though the 5D mkiii has good image quality at high ISOs there is still noticeable noise in the skin tones which I didn't like.  I therefore had to experiment the noise reduction slider in Lightroom, trying to find a setting that gave a less noisy image but at the same time not making the skin look plastic.
For editing I tried to follow the practices of Sue Bryce and Jen Rozenbaum which is minimal editing time.  As they shoot on a daily basis they do not have time for lengthy edits.  They make a lot of money due to their ability to turn around shoots in a day.  Shoot in the morning edit in the afternoon.  Sue Bryce claims that she can edit an image in about 2-5 minutes. Jen Rozenbaum states she hates editing so if an image needs a more comprehensive edit she will outsource it to an editing company.   I therefore set myself a maximum limit of 15 minutes per image.  In that time I managed to do some spot healing, curves adjustment, cloning of the background, a quick skin edit using frequency separation and some liquifying/warp.

I'm still not sold on the shooting technique, I like the aesthetic of the images but the high ISO is not preferable and also shooting with a strong backlight also has a tendency to create an image that is less contrasty and feels a bit fuzzy.   The images without the back light seem to be a lot sharper and more pleasing.

Click on image to Enlarge
 

ISO 1600, 1/100sec, F4 70mm

 ISO 1600, 1/50sec, F4 46mm

 

ISO 1600, 1/100sec, F4 63mm / ISO 160, 1/200sec, F1.2 50mm

ISO 1600, 1/50sec, F4 24mm

 ISO 400, 1/320sec, F1.2 50mm

 ISO 1600, 1/50sec, F4 66mm

 ISO 1600, 1/50sec, F4 51mm

ISO 1600, 1/50sec, F4 70mm

 ISO 800, 1/160sec, F4 27mm

 

ISO 1600, 1/60sec, F4 50mm

 

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