Cosmopolitan (NSFW)

This shoot was Brittany's idea and was loosely based on Mario Testino's "Only girl in the world" shoot for V magazine (with Rihanna and Kate Moss).  Brittany suggested we use Alyssa as the other model and I asked Susan Thomas if she would be able to assist with the fetish style looks.  We needed a cool location for the shoot and Alyssa got permission to use Cosmopolitan night club.  Denny the owner, was great.   He opened up the premises on a Tuesday night, they are closed on Tuesdays, turned on all the strobe lights, turned on the music, provided liquid refreshments and then left us alone for 2 hours to do the shoot.



Technical Info

This shoot was a bit tricky from a lighting perspective.  The lights in the club are really cool as they strobe all sorts of different colors.  They change colour several times per second which makes it impossible to know what colour you are going to get when you take the shot.  I ended up shooting at 12 frames per second, with 1/2 second bursts giving me about 6 or 7 shots with a variety of colours.   
The ambient light is really low, so if you shoot with just ambient light you have to shoot at high ISO.  I was shooting at ISO 2000 to 8000.  This results in some really grainy images which was kind of the look I was going for anyway.

If you decide to add light from a flash strobe and set the exposure accordingly, the ambient light is so low that it doesn't register on the image.   In order to incorporate both the ambient colour lights with some fill flash it got really tricky.  I had to shoot at high ISO and then use a speedlight set at the lowest output (1/128th power) and further diffuse the flash with several layers from a softbox cover.

From a presentation standpoint I wanted this shoot to feel like it was an editorial shoot from one the of the less well known fashion mags like Hunger, 10 or I-D.  I added the borders, page numbering and tried to simulate the center fold shadowing from the open pages.

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