I love action and as a Still Life Photographer, it can never get for me personally adventurous and crazy enough considering the experiments I do in my studio. It has always been my desire to do a shooting about make-up powder and cosmetics paraphernalia. Finally, the time has come and altogether I can say that two things were necessary for this project: extreme fast-working flashlights and much patience.

Once again the floor of my studio needed to be covered with sheets of plastic films. Not to forget, a well prepared concept was necessary in order to have a successful shooting without problems or circumstances.

With a plier holding the make-up brush and make-up powder sprinkled on the bristles, my set design was complete. For every image, I used a small air blower to blow off the powder, which made it look like an explosion.

For the light settings I wanted to keep it fine and clean, so I used the 35 ✕ 60 cm broncolor softboxes. They are very small and this enabled me to get very close with my camera to the brush. For cosmetics right setting light reflexes are very important and that’s why these light shapers were perfect for the shooting.

As I already mentioned, i’s also important that the flashlights react very fast as soon as I press the recording button. If you want to get a clear fine image of all the powder particles and details, you need fast flashlights! Period.

It took me a lot of rehearses and tries until I finally got the perfect image. In the end, the design of the powder reminded me of our cosmos. The powder particles seem so powerful, like the stars and planets of the universe. That’s why I gave this shooting the title „Exploding Pow(d)er!“. It´s about powder being exploded, but it´s about power, too. In this case, I am also representing the power of our galaxy.

As always, the shooting was a lot of fun. It´s not easy to work with powder, but it was worth it. In the end, I got everything clean and tidy so that the next shooting can begin.