Le Vino Rouge- A New Behind the Scenes Video

*A Quick Note:  I recently signed up for Google Plus which conveniently links all user account related apps together including this blog.  I was not reading the fine print and accidentally deleted a default album which happened to contain ALL the images this blog ever had posted.  As you can imagine, my frustration cannot be described in politically correct terms as I now have the task of attempting to reload all the images for nearly 2 years of posts.  I cannot guarantee I will get this done as I am having to work on it in my spare time.

On a lighter note, this post is about a recent collaboration I did with Audrey,  a local cosmetologist and part-time model that  approached me with this creative and unique concept about love, wine, and elegance.  I was instantly on board with this concept as I felt it would be a great opportunity to share some basic lighting techniques and film another behind the scenes video and Strobist tutorial.  And Audrey does such great work with hair, I had to work with her again.  I initially met Audrey during the Audrey Hepburn and Jean Harlow shoots as she did the hair.
See more images and the Video after the jump...

When we think of wine, we think of romance, love, loss, togetherness, and a whole plethora of emotions subjective to the consumer's life and whatever event is occurring a the time.  For this shoot, Audrey wanted to convey thoughts of tasteful sensuality, love, and the relationship with her and the wine.
I wanted to keep viewer's eye focused on Audrey and the wine, so a simple background without texture was a must.  Colors needed to be clean and elegant, hence  the old trusty roles of seamless background paper suited nicely.   And personally, I am not a fan of muslin or felt backdrops.  They feel and look like the 1980's department store studio or that old film guy that is ant-digital and is convinced that sync speed is 1/160th and Caller-ID is of the devil.

When it came down to wardrobe, Audrey suggested some cocktail dresses that she felt both confident and sexy wearing.  A good tip is to make sure to have your subjects or models wear clothing that makes them feel good and look good.  This includes everyone from families to professional fashion models.  The dresses in this shoot both en stowed confidence in Audrey and flattered her positive physical attributes accordingly.
The wine made posing easy as most people tend to get nervous in front of the camera.  One of the main issues I see is that my subjects tend to fidget and not know what to do with their hands.  Giving them a prop or object to hold onto gives the hands something to do and can easily provide a sense of security that renders in their subconscious minds.
We used the prop for some of the shots as it helped convey some of the emotions we were attempting to capture.  We used cream colored sheets versus plain white as I wanted to decrease the chance of overexposing them which could easily happen of proper metering wasn't taken prior to clicking the shutter.  Remember our digital cameras only have 9-12 stops of dynamic range!

We had a good shoot and it was nice to take a break and shoot something fun and unique.  Check out the video and be sure to comment below if you have any questions. Thanks for reading and following my work.  I have  another video in post right now about the Disintegration Shoot I did with some amazing people.