When I started planning my most recent personal project, I realized I needed a theme of some sort as a source of inspiration and to conceptually tie everything together. I knew my theme needed to be something big, exciting, flashy, interesting, and most importantly, cool. Naturally, there was only one option. Chess.
Chess? As in King, Queen, Pawn, black and white squares, board game, checkmate chess? Yup. That's the one.
About now you might be thinking that we have very different ideas of what would make a cool, exciting theme for a photo shoot. Hear me out, OK? I'm not a chess player. I don't think I even know how all of the pieces move around the board. What I do know are these three things: 1) Chess is based on royalty and battles, which are usually cool; 2) Chess has distinct characters, which is great for photo shoot ideas; and 3) Any idea becomes a lot cooler when there are beautiful women involved.
With this in mind, I looked up the history of the various chess pieces and found a bunch of good information. Did you know that the rook (the castle) was originally an armored war chariot? Did you know that pawns represent peasants and the people fighting the front lines of battles? This is good info! I can do something with this! It started to look like this idea was going to work!
The next trick was to find the right team. I knew I wanted to do a beauty shoot that focused on makeup, so my makeup artists had to be top notch. I also wanted to make sure that the hair was equally amazing, because if you're going to have queens and kings and war chariots, the hair is probably going to be pretty outrageous. I knew I needed someone to manage everyone's final look, so I enlisted the help of a wardrobe stylist to figure out jewelry and accessories. Finally, I knew I needed some amazing faces that could pull off the amazing makeup, hair and styling I had in mind.
I already had the hair stylists and wardrobe stylist picked. After fielding replies from over 70 models and 6 makeup artists, I narrowed it down to 7 models and 2 makeup artists and had my team. I also talked to another photographer so that I could get a different perspective on the shoot and signed up Belinda as the set manager.
On the day of the shoot, I had communicated my concepts to everyone involved and turned them loose to interpret the characters and make them their own. What we ended up with amazed me! Everyone had a good idea of what I wanted, but they made each character their own and created looks that they wanted in their portfolio. Our timeline worked, everyone got time with both photographers and only one model didn't make it (due to a rubgy injury). I couldn't have been happier!
At the end of the day, 14 people had volunteered half of their Sunday to get together and make some beautiful images. We all met new people, expanded our networks and made new friends. What did we get out of it? Take a look!
For the following three images:
Makeup by Jacki Webb
Hair by Tanya Owens
Grace
Stephanie
Courtney
For the following three images:
Makeup by Allie Underwood
Hair by Travis Schroeder
Alexandra
Melissa
Nicki
All styling done by Mary Anna Newby
A huge thank you to Alexandra Sheremet for being my photography counterpart and for being her creative self.
Also, I couldn't have done this shoot without my lovely wife, Belinda. She offered advice when everything was in the planning stages, she offered encouragement when I was running low on ideas and she spent the entire day of the shoot taking care of the little things so that I could focus on taking photos.
So, for my next big shoot I'm thinking of something even bigger and better: Monopoly! Just kidding... I hope.
You can see more photos from the shoot here.
Posts
