Deep colour portraits

Today's post will sadly be one of the final ones from me. The truth is making a site like this cover its costs is stupidly hard. The number of subscribers, brilliant though you are, sadly don't cover the hosting costs of this platform, let alone begin to help to fund further shoots. So, I have to admit defeat and stop taking subscriptions. Anyone on a paid subscription has had their subs paused indefinitely, and I will continue to post until everyone's subs have been honoured, content wise.

What this means is there will be posts for the rest of this week, and then it's sayonara. The site will remain up until early next year when this hosting platform's fees expire. After this week, I'll begin to make all posts public.

The schedule will be as per the preview post at the beginning of the month for today and Wednesday, and then I'm planning something a little different for my final post, on Friday.

So with that bitter pill swallowed, let's get onto today's shoot.

I had been in contact with Helen earlier this year and we'd not managed to make anything stick. Helen normally charges for her modelling time but I'd candidly explained that my shoot budget for the year was already committed. I'd be happy to work collaboratively, and would be happy to travel to her neck of the woods if it helped.

A few months later, she dropped me a line rather last minute as she'd been booked in the morning and wanted to try to make the most of the day off work, she'd booked.

With a quick scramble for a studio we got everything lined up in a couple of hours and agreed to meet a few days later to have a play.

So north I headed and met Helen at a small studio that backs onto a hairdresser's academy type set up. It's called Hidden Heights and is one of those under railway arches style units.

I believe estate agents call these things compact and bijoux! Not the largest space, but they had a nice range of the less used colour paper rolls so we settled on this maroony/purple(ish) background for these shots.

As you've no doubt noticed, Helen has a definitive look. An ex-International Fencer, action extra (a recent credit in 28 Years Later) and alopecia advocate. She's got a great work ethic and fell easily into free-flowing her poses, and we caught a large range of images, in the short time we were in the studio.

Shot on a Nikon D750 paired with a Nikkor AF-S 50mm 1.4. 1/250s, f/4 and ISO100. Lighting was a single head into a smallish octa camera left and high. There is some residual daylight hitting the background from the windows and door to frame right.