Beauty Portrait Shoot with Barbora Stasakova

Worcester University is only 10 miles away and currently they have quite a few oversea students studying Business, Sports and Media Studies. Several of the overseas students bring with them experience in the creative industries from their home country and Barbora is one of them, working as she was catwalk model for a clothing brand in Czechoslovakia.

Once again social media introduced us and we recently got together for a beauty and portrait shoot to work through a few ideas.

Libby MacMillan is a Make Up Artist from Cheltenham and it was a good excuse to invite her to the shoot. We had often talked about working on a project but Covid had once again stopped any of that for the last 18 months. It was good to meet both of them and we soon fell into the easy chat which comes when everyone knows what they are doing and slowly gets on with their work.

It was interesting to hear Libby talk of how the requests for make up had changed and the trends moving on from the ‘matt look’ to a ‘glow’, which all brides are asking for these days. As a guy I find make up skills a hidden secret weapon which women can deploy at will. Women are so lucky to be able to change their whole persona with these magic tools. A guy can put on a clean shirt and get a hair cut and that’s about it. It is the women who have control over this mysterious power and like any art form, it is such a pleasure to watch the transformation take place.

I built a ‘beach hut’ set for part of this shoot outside, using a garden shed, some left over bamboo fencing, lots of G-clamps and various potted plants pinched from around the garden. I mounted the Godox AD200 high on a stand with a CTO gel and fired the hard light to give the impression of setting sun.

Barbora was a trouper posing in her bathing suit, as it was a cold night, considerably colder than the 30C balmy evenings she was used to. If you zoom in close you can see her goose pimples.

The rest of the shoot took place in the studio with Libby’s help and the patterns on the wall behind were created by the hand panted cookies I had created on perspex. Using the CITI 600/ Godox 600 to shoot through. I find these patterns add much organic dynamics to the resulting images.

To see the resulting pictures of Barbora please check out the portrait page.

Many thanks and enjoy the video.