Taylor's Twilight

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to work with Taylor for the first time. Based on the success of that first shooting, I wanted to come up with some other photo ideas that would showcase Taylor's look and talents. Taylor has very fair skin. So this started the gears turning. I remembered an interview with one of the actresses from the upcoming Twilight: Eclipse movie, where she remarked that because she was so fair skinned, she didn't need powder to lighten her skin for the role. That planted the idea for a "Taylor as a vampire" shoot. I also figured that as a teenager, Taylor would be psyched about doing a shoot with a Twilight theme.

If you're a reader of David Hobby's Strobist blog, the lighting for the Twilight posters (originally shot by Joey Lawrence) has been discussed before and even imitated. So there was plenty of reference material available online. I've also played around with changing the eye color to get either the red or yellow eyes the Twilight vampires have.

There were a couple of other objectives that I had for this second shoot. One was to play around with the lighting more, in order to get a dramatic effect. The other was to spend more time playing around in Photoshop Elements for more than the simple retouching I usually do. Besides the editing involved in "turning" Taylor, I also wasn't to experiment with a chromakey (also known as greenscreen) backdrop so that I could easily change the background.

Here's one of the first images from that session. I heavily retouched her skin, darkened the lips, and made the eyes red. I then cut her out from the chromakey background. I created a new background by taking a shot of bare tree limbs, darkening it, and tinting it red. I like how the resulting image has a strong red theme to it.

More to follow in a future post...