Holiday Hues

Hello new friends, colleagues, and enthusiasts! I was looking for a good spot to put this series of photos on my site, but no current spot seemed appropriate. So I've decided, on a whim (which is how I make most of my creative decisions) to try out blogging. I hope you will find reading about what I'm working useful if you are on this journey like me. If you're not, I hope you at least enjoy looking at the pretty pictures. :)

This series, like this blog, was put together on a whim. Dalton Walla and I met at a shoot out hosted by Lia Rose Photography in the fall, and had been talking about collaborating. With a trip to New York to meet with some agencies on Dalton's December schedule, we decided to take the opportunity to create some new kinds of images for both of our portfolios. Dalton wanted some shots with Christmas lights, and so I got to work implementing the idea into a theme for a series. After going back and forth between a clean plaid theme, and a colorful Christmas theme--we settled on the colorful theme so we could use some of Zara's awesome holiday blazers a long with this cool INC International gold foil blazer I came across while looking at wardrobe options.

I decided to play with gels on this one--which was seriously tough. As I am still pretty much a newbie at fashion photography, I am still in the process of gathering gear to create the images I have in my head. In a previous test shoot with Leah Sullivan, I had experimented with lighting the backdrop with color, but in this set I wanted to get some different colors on Dalton as well. Since gear shopping is a never ending business for photographers, I played with what I happened to have in my possession to get all these colors.

About ten years ago I worked for a couple of event design firms, and in those days we used par can lighting with these big, flat light bulbs to light ballrooms in different colors. We'd slip in a gel, and be able to light a small section of wall. I'm pretty sure these still get used a bunch in events, but I think they've mostly been replaced with LED devices that can change colors via a controller now. I still have a few of these lights from those days though, and these are what I shone against my white backdrop and Dalton for these shots. Finding positions that worked without creating a ton of unsightly shadows was super tough. This was definitely a learning experience and I plan on playing a lot more with bouncing colored light off reflectors the next time I try this out. I currently shoot everything in the studio with continuous light, but in the coming year I am hoping to be able to start doing some more gel shoots with the help of speedlights.

I hope you are all having a lovely holiday season and I will see you in 2017!!

<3 Alida