Last year has been a pretty crazy ride for me, and it’s been a while since I last had the time to work on a personal project on the photography side of things (been working as a director on multiple advertising campaigns, and a short film).

But last weekend I decided to set aside some time to refresh myself and organized an editorial fashion shoot with a group of friends - all professionals working in the industry. I started out by building the concept and a mood board for the series. Some months ago I had this headpiece custom-made by Nadia Laukkanen for a shoot that then got canceled and never happened, so I decided to dig it out and build the series around it.

I decided to go with the theme of gold and black and wanted the makeup to be pretty graphic. I built a mood board on Pinterest and communicated my wishes to the rest of the team - Anne-Mari Pahkala (the stylist) and Kata Niemi (HMUA).

Lighting-wise I decided to approach this shoot in the simplest way I could. I really wanted to strip things down, and work only with the elements that I felt were vital to build a beautiful light around our model. So for the main light, I decided to go with my trusty broncolor Para 177 that probably produces the most beautiful light out there.

To slightly bring out our model from the background, I added a strip box with a grid. The camera right pointed at the shoulder and her back. I didn’t want the backlight to hit the hair/headpiece strongly, so I added a ND-scrim in front of the strip box in order to soften the light and have it hit the shoulder stronger than the rest of the body. And finally, I pointed a bare-bulb broncolor Siros, on very low power, straight at the headpiece to add some light and shine to it.