SMOKE & MIRRORS, pt. 3

Here’s the link to the images: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7MlCEoEDaftYjlsSDFjNUVId2c

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SMOKE & MIRRORS

Shelby Parks, who goes by @sparksss on Instagram, is a talented videographer who shoots and edits music videos and commercials for a living. She’s a true artist, and highly prolific. She also just happens to be beautiful, so she doesn’t mind modeling from time to time with people whose work she respects. Thankfully, she counts me as one of those people.

We rarely have a lot of free time when we meet, so the day we shot this, on my way back home from a paid shoot in Long Beach, I was surprised to not be too terribly rushed. We both were squeezing each other in, but it wasn’t a horribly rushed case, as had been our previous experiences.

As usual, we shot in her apartment, though she had just moved to a nicer and more spacious place in DTLA. The light was great, and thankfully, with her roommate also being a creative person, they have a variety of pull-down backdrops, lights, and more at our disposal. I was like a kid in a candy store.

With the freedom to do whatever we wanted, I felt surprisingly stifled. I’m so used to working with countless restrictions, whether it’s a close-minded model, a bad location, bad lighting, no equipment, or more, this was a bit hard to get used to. Still, we managed to work out some things.

These are in-camera double exposures, which mean the effect of the layer of the image is done not on the computer. I still retouched and edited the image in post production, but the actual effect, the hardest part of the image, was done by luck, trial, and error. 

Though she looks dark and serious in most of her images, her true personality is surprisingly light and goofy. If you ever meet her in person, you'll find she can't stop smiling and being cheerfully sweet. I think I managed to even capture a smile once or twice here when she let her "model guard" down.

Please let me know what you think, both of Shelby and of the double exposures. Are you a fan of either or maybe even both? Please send me your feedback, positive or negative, and feel free to leave comments in the box below or in my DMs! And thank you as always for your continued support!!

Here’s that link again: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7MlCEoEDaftYjlsSDFjNUVId2c

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