pinup | Mizomi Photography

A few weeks after the Oahu shoot, I had the chance to work with makeup artist Kahulani once again, this time doing a pinup shoot with one of her friends, Honey.

Honey does the vintage Hollywood look really well. For this first one all we used was an AB800 with a beauty dish. The sepia tone and vignette was a preset look in Adobe Lightroom. Also tried a few in black and white.

I used pretty much the same bedroom set as Uilani’s boudoir shoot, minus the tulle hanging from the poles. We were working without an assistant that day, so I didn’t want to risk having the pole falling and whacking someone on the head. Lighting is 3 AB800s, the main in a 5′ Octodome and two behind the folding closet doors in the background.

One of the things I learned on this shoot is that the edge of an air mattress is really hard to hold a pose on. Will have to think about some way of adding more support underneath the sheets to make it easier next time.

This past weekend I had the chance to work with model Alyssa and makeup artist Kahulani again. We also had assistance from Quddus, which made setting up the shoot much easier
(it’s great to have an assistant.)

This time we worked in-studio to create a 50’s pin-up style look.

For lighting we used 2 AB 800 bare bulb strobes aimed into white V-flats. Another AB 800 was used in a beauty dish mounted on a C-stand in front.

We started out using just the beauty dish as our light, with the 2 other AB 800s turned off.

As the shoot progressed, we turned on the 2 AB 800 strobes in the V-flats to get this look.

The V-flats are very easy to make. These are just 4×8 sheets of white styrofoam from Home Depot. They come in various thicknesses. I chose to go with 1″ thick sheets, which run about $18 each. I used gaffers tape to join the sheets together on one side so that they could be propped up in a V-shape.

For our second set, we wanted to try to create a black and white film noir style of setting. We used just 2 lights for this. 1 SB26 with a gridspot aimed at the wall, and another SB26 with a cardboard snoot aimed at the model. The table is covered with a black satin sheet from Ross, and we hung some black cloth on a C-stand behind the model to block light from being reflected from the white cyc wall.