Holly the Fallen Angel - Before and After, plus retouching video

I've been looking at more and more historical painting, and am allowing this to influence my photographic practice. Ever since playing through Devil May Cry, and marvelling at the excellent concept art of DMC: Devil May Cry, I've had the urge to do something almost biblical - involving angels, demons, and all that sort of stuff.

The final image

I've always enjoyed fantasy-subject matter, and science fiction-type stuff, so it was time to create some narrative of my own.

Followers of my blog will know that I've worked with Adelaide based model, Holly Boon a lot in the past, and in particular, our collaborations tend to the theatrical and dramatic. This is in due part to the fact that Holly has an excellent make up artist as a close friend.

The concept for this shoot was an Angel falling from grace. Shot in my home studio, which necessitated a fair bit of retouching, in particular, removing the background in Photoshop.

I am enjoying recording these videos of my retouching process, as it allows me to have focus and intent with my retouching workflow. I will start to commentate these videos once I build up my restructuring workflow and streamline it more and more. I might even do some live streams of retouching in the future - it all depends on how much I want to wrangle with OBS again!

The lighting for this shoot used three lights. One, a strobe, in a 80cm softbox, camera left. Another, a speedlight, bouncing off a white wall, camera right. Finally, there was a second speedlight acting as a rim / hair light with a grid and some barn doors in order to give a hard edge to Holly.

Here's the before image, essentially straight out of camera:

Again, The final image:

Owing to the fact that there wasn't much detail to retouch in this image (with the main elements being the background, I focused on enhancing details like the wings, and the chain of crosses around Holly's wrist.

This shoot was a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to sharing more of the images and retouching process followed on this day. I've posted a different image of this shoot on my Instagram, but I have an enormous back log of editing to do at the moment, so you'll essentially see these images as they're done!

Thanks for dropping by - comments, critiques, and rants are welcome - keen to hear people's thoughts!