Behind The Scenes: Dark Beauty Photoshoot (How I Shot The Image)

I will start this out by saying this idea came about via Vannah. She had mentioned she wanted to do a shoot in dark water, possibly done in a bathtub to get the creepy dark water effect. We wanted to get some Halloween-y and/or Dark themed images in before October started and this is what we came up with.

Cera and I stopped by our local mall and went to a bath store to pick up some black bath bombs in hopes that they would turn the water black. I ended up buying two smaller black bath bombs that ran me about $2.50 apiece.

I made the mistake of not opening them in the store to see how dark they were and unfortunately they were more grey then they were black, but I figured we would give it a chance.

As you can see the bath bombs started to work, we had to wait some time for them to dissolve fully but they definitely didn't make the water as dark as I wanted.

I dug through my bathroom and found a little jar of some activated charcoal I purchased off of amazon for a face mask I wanted to try and decided to throw some in the tub as well, with hopes that it didn't make my tub stained black.

It worked! Finally the water was dark enough (yet semi gritty from the charcoal not fully dissolving).

Cera hopped in first so I could get some test shots for lighting. I bounced a single flash off of my (white) ceiling to brighten up the room.

Then Vannah joined in the tub, which turned out to be a little more cramped then expected. Don't be alarmed, Vannah has a single white contact in her left eye. Also we decided to nix the candles and stones and just focus on them.

Here are some photos of the reality of trying to fit two young (small) women into a regular sized bath tub.

This was the first image I selected. This is straight out of camera. I shot in Raw. Flash bounced off the ceiling and I teetered above them balancing on the edges of the tub.

This is after I retouched using frequency separation and dodge/burn to clean up skin/makeup and darken up makeup.

Here is the final image. During the editing process I decided to go with cooler/purple tones to add to the mystery of the image overall. I toned the image in Lightroom and did some saturation reduction on the reddish tones and brought out the purple/magenta tones.

Gear: Canon Rebel T2i + Canon 18-55 Stock Lens + Yongnuo YN 560 II Flash. Shot at 18mm.
Post Processing: Photoshop (Retouching) + Lightroom (Toning)

Models:
Vannah: Instagram Facebook
Cera: Instagram Facebook Steemit

Me! Instagram Facebook Website Tumblr

xoxo- Nicole