Each year the Heretaunga Rotary Club runs a major book sale and my wife is one of the volunteers that help sort the donated books as they come in. A number of weeks ago she brought home a collection of photographic magazines for me to look through. They were mainly out of date, however I do like looking for images that may provide inspiration for shots.

I came across an image is an old issue of Photo Review Australia in a section called “Emerging Talent” by Samantha Everton that I really liked.

The expression “Putting on your face” immediately sprang to mind and so when I was doing the Getting Ready image in the model series I asked Sian would she like to help me create something.

I set up a small area of my studio to resemble a makeup area and has Sian sit an pretend to put makeup on. I had purchased three paper mache masks and attached them to a length of dowel that was sitting on a stand uses for needlework. The camera was mounted on a tripod so that all of the angles would stay consistent to make the compositing a little easier.

We tried a number of angles and poses to see which one would work before finally settling on one.

I then moved the masks out of the way and Sian positioned herself roughly where each had been and did a different facial expression at the three positions. Shooting in this way meant that the lighting was consistent across the whole image.

Lighting for the image was two soft boxes. The main one was set camera left and up high. (You can just see the edge of it is the top lefthand corner). The second light was camera right and lower down to add some fill. This light had to be carefully placed to ensure that it did not appear in the mirror.

The composite in Photoshop was fairly simple although given that Sian’s face and the masks are different I did have to use the liquify tool a bit.