When Rachel and I started planning for the bird lady shoot, she mentioned that she had a white dress. She thought that it be suitable as a choice to the costume I was designing.

I believe that model shoots are collaborations. I had no problem with her bringing the outfit. So, we took some shots with her in it.

We also included the nest that would form part of the birdlady shoot.

For the lighting I used two lights. My main light was a Godox AD600 in a 1.5m Octobox positioned at 90° to Rachel. The light was covered with a grid so that I control the direction of it. This lighting positioned closely resembled the angle that the sun had been when the birds were photographed.

The imaged were shot using my Nikon D600 f7.1 1/200s ISO200 on a 50mm prime lens.

Although the image below shows it as a square was actually octagonal. On the opposite side to the main light, I positioned a white polystyrene reflector. It provided a bit of fill. At the rear of the studio, I had an Elinchrom D400 firing into the 7 foot umbrella covered with diffusion. This was solely to fill-in the shadows. While Elinchrom and Godox lights operate on different triggers, I could use the optical slave on the Elinchrom. This approach worked really well.

In post I added the wings and the bird sitting on the nest. The image was now looking very angelic so I photographed a glass bowl to create the halo.

The feel of this image is quite different to the birdlady but in someways very complimentary.