I had been pondering the idea of doing a photo shoot with fluorescent paint on a model but never had a set concept of what I wanted. Yasmine, A friend of mine who I had wanted to shoot with for sometime now was finally ready to shoot with me and I felt it was the perfect time to break out the paint!
I was really nervous going into the shoot still having no concept or real idea of what I wanted to do with the paint. I didn’t want to waste Yasmine’s time nor Juliana’s (my makeup artist). While we sat and started with simple splatter we got to talking and Yasmine shared with us that she comes from Native American decent , The Apache Tribe, this blew my mind! I immediately knew what direction I wanted to take this shoot, with a bit of quick research on war paint we pulled 2 looks from traditional artwork and the final was manifested by Yasmine.
Juliana is putting the final touches to Yasmine’s look.
Once the black light was turned on we were all amazed and mesmerized by the colors, and got to truly see Juliana’s art come to life. With such a lovely atmosphere and music playing we couldn’t help but have fun with this shoot. For me, the main goal at the end is to have fun and enjoy the process. BUT! Great pictures are a plus and shooting is only half of the work; The other half, is post production. This is one of my favorite steps because I get to look closer at the images taken and really fine tune them to what I want to portray. Just like the shoot itself the pictures came out fun vibrant and full of life! The bright colors were lovely to look at.
Unfortunately for some of the images felt the emotion wasn’t quite there. I remembered Yasmine mentioning earlier how a black and white image has a different life. So I gave it a shot!
“This is Vogue!”
I thought to myself as I starred at the image in awe. I went back to a few others that were missing that “pizazz” and tried them in black and white. From it came 3 finals, a trilogy if I may say so myself. Each individually lovely but together tell a story of ancestry, struggle, change, hope and prosperity. This is Yasmine’s story, it is her war paint.
