Milk Bath: Self-Portrait Session

I use a lot of photoshop in my images, however you do not NEED to use photoshop to have a creative photoshoot session. This is a series of self-portraits I did using a kiddie pool full of warm water, and a 2L of milk. Many photographers do this in their bathtub, and I will tell you it is HUGELY beneficial because you can just pull the plug and drain it.

I knew going into it that using a kiddie pool was going to be a lot more work and hassle, but I did it because I wanted more room to move around, a greater variety of shots, I didn't want it to be the typical milk bathtub shoot, and also because it was a self portrait session I needed the floor space to set up my tripod...and the lighting happened to be a thousand times better than shooting in my bathroom, which has no window, and no room for lighting set up.

The downside to doing this is I literally had to scoop the water out by hand, made a drippy mess all over the floor, and the smell was awful!! I had to put a white sheet down in the pool to cover up the ridiculous pattern, that combined with drips everywhere made for a lingering sour milk smell in my studio. It was gross. So now I have officially warned you. I totally understand why people use the bathtub!

Being a self-portrait session made it much trickier. I put my remote in a ziplock bag after learning the hard way in a previous water themed self portrait shoot. But being wet meant that I couldn't get up and go back and forth to my camera to fiddle with its settings, and move its position, or even really check to see how it was turning out. I had to obviously do that a little bit, but absolute bare minimum!! Keep lots of towels on hand and on the floor ready for when you step out. And again like all self portrait sessions, take a crazy amount of shots. Probably even more than you would for a dry session.

If you are new to self portraits I highly DO NOT recommend this as one of your earlier shoots.

These of course are still edited, because that is just part of my workflow, and because the pool was ugly and the pulled back shots needed to be fixed, but if you are doing this with someone else as your model you probably could get away with no editing. Here is a unedited shot so you can see the set up better.

I hope you enjoyed a look at my milk bath shoot? As usual feel free to leave any questions you have in the comments!!