Stephanie, corpses bride…..

Some shoots are planned and executed a few weeks later, and sometimes quicker.
Some shoots however are planned and take literally years to complete.
Not because it’s a difficult shoot, but because we really want to do it right the first time, in simple terms, some concepts you don’t do twice, you do it once and if you don’t do it right it’s that, you could of course not publish the series but with a whole team that’s often not the right solution. About 1 1/2 years ago Linda (my regular MUA) had the idea to do a session in the style of the corpses bride vs night of the living dead vs those old Italian zombie movies. I’m a huge horror fan so this really got me excited about the session.

See the backstage video here : https://frankdoorhof.com/web/?p=2542

The team
Without a good team it’s very difficult to do a good shoot, it takes some time to find the right people but this has to be one of my favorite teams, and also the team I work with most of the time.
MUA : Linda Rutgers (www.beautyfx.nl)
Assistant : Wendy Appelman (www.wendyappelman.nl)
Model : Stephanie Popping
Assistant 2 : her boyfriend 🙂
Photographer : Frank Doorhof

Of course we also shot a backstage video, this will be online later this weekend or start of next week.
Location, location, location
One thing was 100% sure, this was NOT going to be a studio session.
We needed a great location.
When I travel abroad and especially in England, Scotland and Ireland I see a lot of old graveyards and those are of course great for these kind of setups, however were we live it’s all modern. And to be honest I’m not the kind of person that has no problems with shooting on a graveyard. It’s the final resting place of people and that’s a place you should of course threat with respect. I’ve seen so many graveyard shoots and to be honest most of them I find “shocking” and I would not want to participate in those. But I really could not think about another location to shoot something like this.
Close to our studio we found there was a graveyard with a very old area, this is rather unique for this location because we live in “new land”, or in other words land won back from the sea in the 1940-50’s. However this location would be perfect. A few months ago I scouted the location and fell in love with it. It’s the backpart of a normal graveyard but that area contains  the perfect “high build” tombes we all know from the movies, so we really needed to book that location. Well it was not that easy….
In the Netherlands we are allowed to shoot on graveyards without needing a permit according to most people you ask, but because I already felt a bit “sensitive” about the location we decided to get a permit for the location, and that was not as easy as it sounds…… finding the people responsible for the location was a real adventure and it took Annewiek 2 whole days of calling, following up and getting the wrong people who pointed her towards the wrong people who thought the wrong people were the right people….. in the end it worked out however and we got permission to shoot there.

I have to add that if we would have gone with just small flash I would have probably skipped the permit part for the simple reason that as mentioned before we did nothing against the law. But for this location session we’re talking about a small team of 5 people, weird clothing and rather extreme makeup, and of course a lot of gear including a gas generator to power the smoke machine, because the location is located in a small community and we did not want to have explain to people that we did not need a permit, just making sure you have one will often give rest to people visiting.

Making it work
Some sessions you just “wing”.
With this session I wanted everything to fit.
Because you can’t do everything with light it’s important to already have a good idea about what you want the final result to look like. In this case I wanted a dark, vintage look resembling the old horror movies, not too much color more mimicking the corpses bride (Tim Burton), and a hyper reality look that I love for this kind of shoots. I experimented a bit with the looks in Photoshop so that it would be easier to place the light on location. This is very important because if you don’t plan the look/light setup you will probably most of the time wind up with images that are not 100% correct and you will need a lot of Photoshop, and let’s be honest we all love to shoot and spend less time behind the computer (says Frank who is now spending quite some time on his blog posts :D)

Gear
For this session we used the following gear.
Phase One DF camera with a Leaf AptusII 7 digital back and Schneider 80mm f2.8 lens
2x Elinchrom Ranger RX speed with A heads.
For the mainlight I used the Elinchrom Maxilight with the new grid by Honeycombgrids
For the accents I used the standard reflector delivered with your strobes
Everything was tethered to a Macbook Pro 17″ i7 with matt screen mounted on the tethertools aero table
And of course the usual gear 😀