Our Photo Was In The Sunday Times Style Magazine!

We were just about to part ways for the festive period when a notification popped up on our Instagram - it was something exciting, the perfect end to a great year!

We had done a shoot midway through 2022 with Eniola, the founder of Nuola Wig's, a luxury wig brand that she had started from her house and now had a thriving business. She wanted a series of strong photos to choose from for an article she was to be featured in about her business journey. The notification we saw was that our photo was in The Sunday Times Style Magazine alongside a write-up about Eniola. We were so excited and proud to see our work featured!

The first part of the shoot was a focus on creating a scene with Eniola at the centre between some of her amazing wigs.

Once we had completed the first set of regal-looking shots, we thought it would be fun to mix things up a bit. We asked Eniola to jump around and play with the wigs, creating something more dynamic and playful. We were absolutely delighted when one of these shots was chosen for the final article - it was a spontaneous decision that really paid off!

Here is the photo in the magazine:

A huge thanks to Eniola for the wonderful shoot and a massive shout-out to Praise Law Makeup for the amazing look:

Praise Law Makeup Instagram

Behind The Shots: Fella and the All Star Challenge 2020

We couldn’t believe a year had passed already. We packed up all our gear into the car and began our evening drive over to Folkestone. 

It was our shoot day for the All Star competition; an annual hairstyling and portraiture competition hosted by men’s hair and skin care brand American Crew. The founder of American Crew, David Raccuglia, is not just a talented barber, he is also a highly skilled, self-taught photographer with a love for classic black and white images; reminiscent of classic 1940-60 Hollywood portraiture. From this combination of photography and mens hair styling skills, American Crew was born and a competition celebrating both of these passions was created. 

Last year we came very close to reaching the finals, with our photographs of model Soren Paillou and our good friends at Fella Hair were eager to enter again. This time they had organised two models each with distinctive looks, styled by barbers Alex Wakefield and Jayson Black.

Last years images which made it to the top 20.

The Models and the looks

This year, both barbers had come up with a back story and personality for their look. Jayson styled model George Blake into a Harley Davidson-riding rocker with a glorious beard and a love for rock bars and neat bourbon. Alex had gone for a Mod culture inspired look, a sharp looking young man with a chip on his shoulder portrayed by fashion model Soren Palliou.

The Final images

Here they are! Our final front and side profile shots for the competition:

Soren rocking the Mod look with some amazing textured hair as styled by Alex

George with his glorious beard and hair styled by Jayson

Closing thoughts

Unfortunately our images didn’t make it to the finals this year, but they were spotted on the judging table in one of the videos American Crew streamed and we received some encouraging comments:

We were really happy with our shots and were blown away by the efforts made by the barbers and models. A huge thank you to Alex, Jayson, Bobby, George and Soren. We already can’t wait for next year!

Behind The Scenes

Our basic lighting setup for the shoot was a large octabox as the key light, a small softbox as the hair and rim light positioned behind and a lot of reflected and bounced light was played around with to get the look just right.

Our basic lighting setup

Editing

We were shooting tethered to keep an eye on the images as we went and everyone was pretty chuffed with the shots straight out the camera. After we got home we cracked on with some high end editing. Our workflow was firstly to get the image looking right in Lightroom by adjusting the tones, clarity, highlights and contrast to give them a bit of punch. Then we took them over to photoshop for our high-end final touches. The 3 stages of the images are shown below:

Credits and social media links

Models:

Soren Paillou

George Croft

Hair Stylists:

Alex Wakefield

Jayson Black

Fella Barbering:

Fella

Fella Folkestone

Fella Margate

American Crew UK:

IG Page

BEHIND THE SHOTS: UV PORTRAITS

Welcome!  This is a new blog series where we will be sharing the behind the scenes from our shoots. We have done lots of different and experimental photography at Block Art and we will delve into how they were set up, the equipment we used and all the things we learnt along the way.

On our most recent photography meet up we decided to take portraits using UV paint. The event was hosted at our regular indoor home at the Jolly Sailor pub in Canterbury. I had seen a few images using this effect on Instagram and I was itching to try it myself

THE GEAR

Lenses: I mostly used one lens during the shoot; my favourite go to: the nifty-fifty (50mm F1.4). I like this lens for its portability (i’m often cycling with the camera in my backpack) and it offers fantastic low light capabilities which was a must for this shoot.

The lighting: I opted for a 20W UV bulb and a bulb holder. The bulb holder had a clip built into it which came in handy for mounting it at various angles. I also used an off camera flash triggered via a radio controller.

The paint:  We used various UV paints and a couple of different makeup brushes and paint brushes.

(I’ve linked all the products you’ll need at the end of the post)

The shoot

Our resident model Hrista applied her face paints while we set up our gear. Hrista wanted the makeup to appear as a burst of light around her eyes. She created a striking pattern using various colours including splashes of paint to appear like a big explosion of paint stars.

Once Hrista had finished the amazing paint work, I tried moving the bulb around different distances from her face. In order to make the glowing paint visible I had to kill the ambient light in the room. Bringing the lamp near to Hrista and just out of frame of the photographs caused quite intense glow and pop to the paint. Moving the lamp further away gave a lovely subtle glimmer to the paint. I mostly shot using wide apertures (at f1.4-2.0). I was manually focusing on a tripod so this didn’t cause too many focus issues. Ideally having the aperture it a bit narrower (f5.6 or above)  would have given me better depth, but the light was very limited. I kept the ISO at 200 to avoid grain. The shutter speed stayed between 1/50-1/25 this was enough to kill the remaining ambient light of the room but allow for the paint to still show up. This led to some pretty out of this world, science fiction style shots, something I could imagine in the Bladerunner universe.

To mix things up I then experimented with backlight/rim lighting to add a bit more depth to the portraits. I set up a wireless remote triggered flash just behind our model. I added an orange gel to this backlighting to add some complimentary colour that would contrast to the purple/blue tone of the UV bulb. The flash was pointing towards the back of her head. As with the previous images I killed the ambient light to isolate the subject.

With the second set of shots, using flash I also experimented with the use of a silver reflector to help “capture” more of the UV light and provide increased illumination from the bulb, which worked very effectively. This can be seen on the right hand side of the image below:

All editing was done via Adobe Lightroom, the effect was very cool Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC). I mostly increased the clarity to bring out the paint some more and changed the hue of the blue to a more aqua tone, which was just personal preference. An example of the before and after can be seen below.

Closing thoughts

The photos produced were very experimental and not to everyone's taste but it was so much fun to shoot and play around with the glowing paint. I went for some pretty extreme and surreal images inspired by science fiction, but a more subtle use of the UV paint and lighting could also produce beautiful photos.

It was the most fun i’ve had shooting in a while. Combining both flash and UV lamp worked very well and I was still finding new shots and ways to play around, right up to the end of our 2 hour shoot.

I hope this has inspired you to try out your own UV portraits! If you’d like to know more or have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you!

The photography meet-ups we host are events held in and around Canterbury; so if you’re a photographer who’d like to come along please send us a message, comment or email to find out more!

Credits:

Big thanks to Thom Toop who took all of the behind the scenes shots featured here and helped massively with positioning the light. He also took some fantastic shots which were recently featured on our facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/BlockArtMedia

Product links:

UV Bulb

UV Glowing face/body paint

Bulb holder