How I Got the Shot with Vanessa Joy
As a working photographer, most of my shoots are for other people. Whether it’s weddings or commissioned portraits, I don’t get a lot of time just to explore my own creativity. But I recently had the perfect excuse to set up a shoot just for fun, and I ran with it.
I recently had the opportunity to bring an idea to life. I had a couple of ideas and some real-world objects that I thought would make fun photographs. One idea was pink and bubbly: I wanted to use the color of bright pink bubble gum for a poppy and colorful type shot. The other one was inspired by this bright red lipstick I have and a fun black hat.
There is a device, Datacolor ColorReaderEZ, that lets you capture the color of real-world objects and replicate them for paint colors. So, I had the idea to capture the color of the bubble gum and red lipstick and get backgrounds that matched them from Savage Universal.
The Bubble Gum Shot
My favorite eye cream comes in a beautiful blue container, almost like a Tiffany Blue, and I wanted to capture that color to use as a background. I figured it would be the opposite of the bubble gum, and that could be interesting as well. I thought it would be fun to have it against the pink color of bubble gum and photograph a model blowing a bubble in front of it, in addition to matching the pink color… or maybe use both?
The idea was that the opposing color would provide the perfect contrast to the bubble the model was blowing. But once I had the bubble gum and the eye cream bottle in the same place, I realized that the two colors worked well together and decided to use blue as the second color.
The Lipstick Shot
I have a red lipstick that I really like the color of and wanted to photograph a model wearing that lipstick against a background of the same color. It’s sort of a darkish red and I thought it would look great if the model was wearing a black top and my black hat that has large, decorative holes in the rim. Ideally, I’d perfectly place her eye in one of the holes and grab focus through there, but since the holes make a grid-like pattern, I knew focusing might be an issue and that the camera may grab the grid instead of the model’s eye.
