Rachel Mason was using a new hair colour and highlight system, and needed some images to aid her tutorials. Mollie has an amazing hair colour to begin with, and the new treatment accentuated it nicely. The emphasis needed to be on Mollie’s hair, its colour and texture.
Working from back to front:
Frame right is a gridded 40cm white beauty dish on an Elite Pro 300 at a ¼ output, above head height and angled down to catch the top of her hair. It also skimmed across her hair further down for the texture. The same light was also providing the accent light on her left arm.
Frame left, and at a similar distance back is another Elite Pro 300 firing at almost ½ output through a standard reflector and a 30° grid. Again, this is for accent and also hair texture.
Front light, as in main, was a 70cm gridded white beauty dish on an Elite Pro 600 at above head height and angled down towards Mollie’s face. Almost at ½ power.
Nikon D3 1/200th sec ISO200 24-70mm Nikkor f5
Same lighting setup as above, but with a blue gel’d Elite Pro 300 at just above ¼ output, firing through standard reflector and a 20° grid standing out of frame right (just!) and aimed in the general direction of the backdrop behind Mollie. As Mollie is now facing straight on to camera, you can see how much better her cheekbones are defines. The main light (gridded 70cm white beauty dish) hasn’t moved, but the light is now skimming across her cheekbones and casting a shadow across her cheeks. The beauty dish is above head height on a standard light stand alongside me (to my left).
The accent lights were increased marginally, as I felt the texture in the first image wasn’t quite as strong as I would like.
Nikon D3 1/200th sec ISO200 24-70mm Nikkor f5
Here, I had Mollie twist her hair, and as you can see, it nicely shows the difference in her hair tones, highlighted quite nicely by the main light. The accent light to frame left was brought a little further forward, so as to maintain the skim across Mollie’s hair, and also provide the accent to her shoulder, giving it shape and form.
Nikon D3 1/200th sec ISO200 24-70mm Nikkor f5
And one for fun.
Nikon D3 1/160th sec ISO200 24-70mm Nikkor f5.6
Rachel Mason can be found at www.rachelmasonhair.com
Mollie can be found at www.facebook.com/MollieMinaj
