Indonesian style with Michelle 2

I had a very cool shoot with Michelle. I know her for a while now and have only seen her in western style clothing. So when we decided to do a shoot together I asked her about her roots. Well … Indonesian. And based on that fact we decided that it would be fun to do an Indonesian style studio shoot.

And so we started with the preparations for this shoot. Michelle organised some very cool clothes and accessories like hand fans and an umbrella.

I had an idea in mind of shadows of Wayang puppets on the background to add up to the Indonesian style. So I did some Photoshop work and converted some small jpeg images of Wayang puppets to black and white silhouette images of high resolution. These black and white images were converted to cut-patterns. With these cut-patterns and we cut out the wayang puppets from black cardboard with a cutting machine. They came out very cool.

Here are some behind the scenes images of the creation of the puppets:

During the shoot we worked out several concepts and we got some great images. Actually we got way to much cool images so the selection of the final images was a tough process this time.

Here are some of the results:

As for the lighting setup we used a beauty setup as a base. A studio strobe with a beauty dish from above as a key light and a strobe with a small octabox from below as a fill light. In addition to that a strobe with a strip box was used to create a rimlight.

For the puppet silhouettes I used small studio flashes with only a flag from cinefoil. For some images a strobe with a standard reflector was used to brighten up the rest of the background.

The shady hand fan shot has been done with a single strip box. And the umbrella did have a strobe with a standard reflector behind it to give it it’s glow.

So a big thank you Michelle for the great preparation work and the cosiness during the shoot. I really enjoyed it and you did a great job.