Celine: What light can do with blonde hair

This post is also available in: Dutch

This was nice, working with blonde hair again. Thank you Celine. It’s great to have the possibilities to create bright tones, dark tones or both at the same time with only some movement of the lights. Blonde hair is perfect to create extra contrasts there, with a simple use of the light meter and careful placement of the lights.

We didn’t use a makeup artist, Celine gave herself the right accents and I brought the contrasts and directional looks with the lights. I didn’t use Photoshop for softening, it’s all in the lens and the light. Flare and bright light onto the camera creates a kind of washed-out hazy look with less contrast. I used Photoshop to create the toning, to erase some stray hairs and to make some minor local contrast adjustments.

The mirror shots are made with available light, coming from the mirror behind Celine. I created the soft look with the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM lens at f/1.2, the bokeh is really creamy and smooth then.
For the shots on the bed I used a large octa from behind Celine. And the other shots are made with a beauty dish with grid, some shoots for the hair and a stripe to give Celine a nice rim light to bring in more depth. All lights are flagged except another light on the background.