Black and gold glam

I sourced black and gold clothing from Topshop and Miss Selfridge aswell as using borrowed clothing and some of my own.

The models had their hair and make-up done in a more dramatic style with dark eyes, lips and hair messed up.

     The other male model let me down last minute, so the shoot ended up going in two separate directions.  Firstly, Tahmina was dressed in a black bandage dress with high gold heels and we shot her with Raashid in a smart suit, which was different from the broken down ‘rough and ready’ image I had in mind. We shot them in this tunnel leading to the mailbox carpark which was a long corridor with one blue wall and one glass panelled wall which created two interesting effects. I wanted the shoot to be quite sexy and needed to denote a powerful woman leaning over the male. We shot Raashid separately in his suit in the front of a smart hotel reception, this again was not an expected result of the shoot, but is a useful by-product showing a different style of work.

We shot Tahmina in two different classy dresses in different parts of the hotel reception, which again was a different style to what I had originally planned. This added ‘sophisticated’ hotel shoot is a nice extra to add my portfolio though as it shows more of the traditional, slick, fashion photography element in a different setting.

The last part of the shoot was mainly about shooting Shannon, the androgynous model in quirky outfits in this underground setting. I dressed her in black leather trousers with a black leather bra top, then into a gold and black t-shirt. She then changed to gold leggings with the same top, shooting with and without the black blazer. We changed the trousers to black hotpants and lacy tights, then changing the top back to the bra top. To finish the shoot, theblack leather panelled dress was used with black sunglasses. I swapped accessories around, using a simple gold bar necklace, a gold elephant pendant and a black spiked bracelet. The gold brogues and black mary-jane shoes were swapped around depending on the style of the outfit. Shannon ran with the brief and pulled the stops out creating some unusual poses and placing herself in uncomfortable positions in the middle of the carpark, in the spotlights and against the wall. We experimented with trying the jacket on and off outfits as well as with her smoking or wearing shades. A couple of my favourite poses  were when she placed herself on top of the bin, crouching on top snarling like a vampire and then laying over the bin smoking with her legs against the wall.

      She gave the shoot lots of attitude, fun and sexy arrogance was everything I wanted to portray through the styling, location and her as the model. The smoking added a more artistic depth to the images as the smoke pouring out of her mouth and encircling her created some ironically beautiful effects.

   The sexy yet androgynous styling worked well on her, suiting her personality and look and the images produced were of the more creative location shots that I wanted to produce.

There were a couple of shots with Tahmina in a black corset top with a gold skirt and black blazer along with Shannon in the street style leggings, t-shirt and jacket combination. These images looked great as the androgynous style worked really well with Tahmina’s feminine outfit.