If anyone knows Silhouette, shes a very happy go lucky peppy goth musician, so the thought of angry/intense made her giggle a bit – here’s the result
We had a Beauty dish infront (Lumodi) and a bare flash zoomed at her face to create a back rim light

After that was done we tried to do the ‘American punk’ thang!

Lumodi beautydish was in front, with a bare rim to the right. The rim was on a tripod rather than a proper lighting stand, so you do get the collar cutting a pretty harsh shadow onto the face, but it’s still a pretty damn cool photo all things considered!

This shot was the front Lumodi again, but Kelly had the cool idea of putting our circular reflector behind her head, giving a shiny look. I’m loving this look. If I could shoot it again, I’d make sure the specular highlight was behind her hair, rather than just off to the left, but that’s really nit picking Probably my favourite image from the day.

We were all having so much fun so we decided to take it out into the staircase -  we havent even been out there for anything apart from 2 fire drills (23 floor up.. not fun!), but luckily the rawness worked in our favour.. concrete and pooly put together railings work in our favour. It some how brought out a warmth in her posing (if that makes any sense)
We used the beauty dish in the front for her face, and used a bare speedlight on a step behind her for rim. It would have been fantastic to have an umbrella flash below the beauty dish as a third light to make it look more fashionable, but personally I like the mood it brings to the end result, and more artsy.

We quickly played around with doing the whole ‘faking what angle you are’ thing.. and made the floor look like she was pushing against it.. Unfortuntely the staircase was not forgiving and was rather thin, and we couldnt put our flashes in the places we wanted too, so what we did was put a bare speedlight infront of her on the floor, pointed directly at her head, to act almost like a spotlight.. it was definitely something funky to try

And a quick bonus iPhone BTS shot, of Kelly shooting in our tiny Melbourne apartment!

Rick & Kelly

This time we were asked by Oscar of Special Events Video to do a pic for the event “Miss Mae’s Burlesque Box”.

The amazing Aurora Kurth traveled for 2 hours to meet us for a quick poster shoot, bringing 3 massive bags filled with props and costumes.
With burlesque performers, each of their own costumes have a personality attached to them, so this made it extra fun to shoot with. We weren’t shooting “Aurora”, we were shooting “Miss Mae”.

Our main goal when shooting for a poster is to make sure the lighting is consistent, the background is plain, and that the image would sit perfectly on a poster, and to fit plenty of text around it if need be.
This is a Behind the Scenes pic with Oscar shooting a quick iPhone snap – we had a beauty dish(lumodi) above to light her face/shoulders with the best lighting we could, and on the opposite side on the ground we have an umbrella flash shooting up to light the rest of her body, and to fill in any shadows created by the beauty dish.

Here are some of the options we gave to our client.

Unlike our previous poster shoots where we’ve been able to build the poster ourselves, we just hand it off with minimal edits. Anything further than that is the job of the graphic designer.

The client ended up using one of the first images we shot from the night, and here is the final poster!

I rocked up about mid day, as the talented Javier was giving a small workshop on studio lighting 101. Some fantastic tips in there for newbies and experienced alike, so big props to Javier for sharing the knowledge

For the day I brought along the trusty Nikon D60, two SB-600 Speedlites, a shoot-through umbrella, and the amazing Lumodi 18″ Silver Beauty Dish.

First up was a fire performance by Brendan Angelo, and let me tell you, hot fire is hot. You could feel the heat coming off those things, and I wasn’t even that close!

Then came a quick shoot with the wonderful Lucinda Lou being a little cheeky with some cupcakes.

As we finished, I happened to stumble upon this young lass on the stairs looking frightfully lost..

Back upstairs, the talented Jess was busy snapping away in the main studio area.

With not much time to spare, I grabbed Brendan for a quick studio session, fire and all.

Last but certainly not least, were the troublesome trio. Oscar V. Jonas, Greg Boston, and Daniel Smith.

And finally, one more group shot of the three

Post production was all done in Lightroom 4, with effects added in Alienskin Exposure 4

A final giant thankyou to the amazing Hannah for organizing the whole thing. Absolutely wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for this girl right here.

Looking forward to the next one!

Rick

It took us long enough but we managed or organize a busy day of studio and location shooting.

Photographer: Kelly McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Miss Cherry Le Minx
Makeup: Miss Cherry Le Minx

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Miss Cherry Le Minx
Makeup: Miss Cherry Le Minx

This girl is a stunner, and I’m sure she’s gonna go far in the modeling world! Keep an eye out for this one!

R & K

Lauren did an incredible job, and you wouldn’t even know that she’s not normally a model!

Photographer: Kelly McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Lauren Halstead
Makeup: Lauren Halstead
Designer: Alexandra Gill-Chambers of Alexandra’s Dressing Room

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Lauren Halstead
Makeup: Lauren Halstead
Designer: Alexandra Gill-Chambers of Alexandra’s Dressing Room

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Sìlhouette D’Amour
Makeup: Sìlhouette D’Amour
Designer: Tentacle Threads
Exposure: 1/200 @ f/10, ISO100, Off camera 2x SB600

Photographer: Kelly McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Sìlhouette D’Amour
Makeup: Sìlhouette D’Amour
Designer: Tentacle Threads
Exposure: 1/200 @ f/10, ISO100, Off camera 2x SB600

For this shoot, we couldn’t be too fussy about staying dry, and the wind was up, which meant no umbrellas.. bare flash it is!

Here’s a quick BTS peak.

Oscar has been learning to use a Fire Staff for a few months now, and I’ve been wanting to do a shoot involving fire for some time now. While we didn’t have proper fire performers’ “Firewater” to fuel the flames, we made do with good ol’ kerosene.

We got down to the beach at about 8pm, but it was still far too bright to light up and get a good exposure. We played around with a few backgrounds and lighting settings while waiting for the sun give us that ‘dusk’ look. It came and went all too soon, but we a few good shots while it was there.

Technically I had to on my A-Game. Forever constantly changing exposure, aperture and strobe distance/power. It felt like guesswork, but practice makes perfect!

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Model: Oscar V Jones
Exposure: I can’t recall strobe settings, but respectively: Shot 1) 1/160, f/8, ISO 200. Shot 2) 1/5, f/9, ISO 100. Shot 3) 1/4, f/4.5, ISO 100. Shot 4) 1/4, f/4.5, ISO 200

I learned a hell of a lot about balancing exposures. Next time we’ll get some beauties

The event is called Steam Up, and I’m a Steampunk/Sci-Fi geeky nutter, so I was more than keen to shoot this for Oscar.

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Client: Oscar V. Jonas of Special Event Video
Model: Kerry X
Makeup: Kerry X
Designer: Alexandra Chambers of Clockwork Butterfly
Exposure: 1/160 @ f/6.3, ISO 200, off camera strobe: 1x sb600 in the Lumodi 18″ Beauty Dish in front.

They ended up choosing the first one for the poster layout, and we crafted up this final product for the event.

I was lucky enough to attend such a gathering, and met so many amazing people!

Photographer: Rick McQuinlan of McZany Photography
Models: Daniel Smith is a Shibari practitioner based in Melbourne. Hannah Chew is his willing participant.
Exposure: Exposure: 1/160 @ f/6.3, ISO400, Off camera 1x sb600 through a Silver 18″ Lumomdi Beauty Dish, 1x sb600 bare to the right.

In Shibari, the Nawashi (rope artist) creates almost geometric patterns and shapes that contrast wonderfully with the female body’s natural curves and recesses. Visually, the tight ropes and their texture provide a counterpoint to smooth skin and curves. The hard edges of the rope reinforce the softness of the body’s graceful shape: the model is like a canvas, and the rope is paint and brush.

Cat Finnerty is a pirate. Nuff said.

There’s already plans for another meet some time soon, so hopefully I’ll be there with camera in hand!

Our latest was a police line up.. 7 girls, 7 style offenses. We wanted to get a range of people instead of the generic ‘alternative’ models that we usually love/have been working with lately.

Our offenses were: Too Sweet, Too Glamorous, Too Punk, Too Rock’n'Roll, Too Goth, Too Vintage, and Too Dramatic.

With the lighting we wanted to give the illusion of both people standing in a lineup/getting their mug shot taken with a hint of an interrogation light on them, but also a bit of a soft glamour light to still keep them looking good.

We shot each girl seperatly, lighting with a transparent umbrella & SB600 flash set to 1/4 on the ground, and another SB600 in an 18″ Lumodi beauty dish(silver) from above, set to 1/2. The camera was set to 1/125, ISO 200 and F/6.3.

As you can see we’ve put a blue tack X on the wall.. This was to mark 5ft so that we could make our lines at the correct height.. as for the bloody red hand stain… this was a halloween accident, and don’t worry he’s still alive surprisingly the hand came in handy and made it easier to align the girls’ heights and scale the pictures accordingly.

I used a very thin ‘rectangle tool’ to stretch the length of the ‘canvas’ and luckily it snapped to the layers underneath, so shifting the images across was made a lot easier with this.
I was trying to research a method to stitch the images all together quickly.. The best thing I got was crap -  it was a tutorial on how to use Content Aware Delete in CS5…..

It took a lot of clone stamping, dodging and burning, and shifting brightness on each layer to get it to a workable piece. I then created an overall copy of all they layers so I could work on the overall background as one piece, but kept the remaining layers underneath so that if I mucked up an edge on someone when editing the background I could just erase that part and it would show the person underneath.

Once all the shadows and lighting was even across the image I then overlaid some standard shape/lines as the height lines in a police lineup. I had each model tell me their heights before shooting so I knew that the tallest was 5’11″ and the shortest was 5’1″ and this helped guide the lines.

Once they were overlaid correctly I had the AWESOME task of erasing the lines that were over the girls, to make sure it looked like it was on the wall behind them and didnt look fake. I turned the lines opacity down to about 70% instead of a cartoon looking 100%.

After a little more Dodging and Burning, and a soft light highpass filter over the image to crisp it up, I finished it up with text on the wall and their boards, and VWALAA.

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