Dramatic natural lighting photoshoot - Drew

brunette model sitting with her hand covering her face in a dramatic natural lighting photoshoot with an astrology themed top by London photographer Ailera Stone

I’ve been experimenting a lot with lighting and shadows lately. Today’s shoot is one of the more obvious examples. It’s a quite dramatic natural lighting photoshoot I did with model Drew @ Base/Bame models. We shot it in my tiny kitchen/living room and I just couldn’t resist the sun blazing through the skylight. It made everything seem just a little bit theatrical. You can see my other latest test shoots where I played with the lighting on my blog.

We did three looks (though I had even more), but I got so mesmerized by the light glowing off the first black playsuit (from Motel Rocks), that I spent the most time shooting with it compared to the others, and it’s still my favorite. Let me know yours!

Drew is quite a new model, but she’s done many lovely self portraits before which I loved the aesthetic of and went in a similar way in this shoot. I knew I really wanted to shoot with her and that we would get along when I saw her instagram. She’s a really talented artist and I love her style, do check it at @drew____draws

As I thought, we had a really good time shooting and talking about everything, having some vegan sausage rolls and fruit, just a lovely afternoon right before the pandemic really started last year.

Star filter

It also seemed like a perfect time to test out my new star/sparkle filter which basically creates a hazy dreamy effect and any bright light becomes a magical sparkle. I shot most of the pictures below with it and loved what it added to the photos. Let me know what you think, can you see it? If you tried something like that too, let me know what you used and how you found it. With the one I have (Cokin 4 star filter + an adapter), I can’t use it with wider angles as it creates a very harsh dark vignette. (But that’s when I insist using my 24mm – 70mm lens which I love, so not difficult to avoid that..).

Pink top from Pretty Little Thing

she cries in pearls
like the world has left her
picking what hurt her
from the ground
as a miracle

a. stone

Re-editing Pictures

For this last red outfit, I shot it without the star filter and with the direct sunlight it came out very strong and with a high contrast. My initial edit of these last pictures was still very bright, clean and with that contrast preserved. However before doing this blog post I realized I really didn’t like that edit as much, so I re-edited these for the blog post. I turned down the contrast by a lot, I made the tones a lot more muted and vintage looking and added a lot of grain for a more film like feel. And I personally like it a lot more – film and nostalgic feeling is what I prefer currently the most. See below for an example of what I mean and let me know which you prefer?

And follow me on instagram if you don’t already, I share a lot more there: @ailera