Vintage Modern Assiut Head Drapes
Photo Creation Tutorial
I’ve been spending practically all of my waking hours working on Cloth of Egypt. Recently, I got together with local belly dancer/model Nicole Simone for a series of head shots. My team spent a long hard day working to craft a series of photos for CoE. For this shoot, I induced local Bay Area hair stylist, braiding artist and belly dancer Misia Rockte to do hair. Nicole Simone did her own makeup, creating a polished belly dance performance face. We were joined by Scheherazade, who helped style and keep watched for the details like flipping jewelry, shiny noses, issues that I (behind the camera) wouldn’t necessarily catch.
In about four hours, we shot just under 500 images, and had six costume changes. Because we were shooting from the mid-torso up, Nicole didn’t have to change of all her clothes with each new look. With Misia watching the hair, and Scheherazade watching costume and makeup, we set up in front of my front door with two diffused lights to my right (you can see the hot-spot on Nicole’s shoulder.)
What equipment did we use? My camera is an inexpensive Cannon Power Shot and the lights are a pair that came with a table-top studio kit purchased for a song on eBay years ago. These are a pair of 11″ lamps with a diffuser covers and are still available on the manufacturer’s website. www.obnphoto.com We positioned them one high and one straight towards Nicole’s face. For a backdrop, we used my front door, which is conveniently painted “I rent an apartment” white.
Photo One: Raw Image
Below is Nicole’s raw image. My goal at this point is to create a side profile shot in the style popular at the turn of the last century. We took about 12 shots in the series, and this is the one that I liked the best. You can see that the image is a bit too dark on the left. Just turning it to black and white just wouldn’t produce the best results.
Photo Two: Brightness & Contrast
My first goal is to adjust the brightness and contrast. Photoshop is a big, beastly program, but I find myself using the brightness and contrast sliders on virtually every photo I take these days! I boost brightness by quite a bit to bring the door to white. I also boosted the contrast to emphasize the silver pattern in the assiut.
Photo Three: Skin Perfection
Nicole Simone is a lovely woman, but there’s always room for a bit of clean up. I use the healing tools to clean up some skin imperfections, a few of the moles on her chest and some other details. During this phase I also used the dodge tool to brighten up her face and then brightened up her eyes just a little bit more. I used the burn tool to darken her lips and eyelashes. Good makeup and bright lighting, and a model with gorgeous skin reduces the amount of “digital botox” needed.
Photo Four: Black & White with Tint
To enhance the vintage quality of the image, I convert using the black & white controls. Using the b&w control, rather than grayscale, allows you to control the color channels, so I reduced the red channel to make Nicole’s skin tone look more even in the antiqued image. I also upped the blue to darken the the deeper tones of the feathers and flowers.
Photo Five: Final Changes
I pulled out an actual vintage cabinet card from my collection and really took a good hard look at it. I realized that my sepia was too pinkish. So I played with the b&w sliders to find a more golden tone. Then I clone stamped the peep hole out of the image. I went back in with the burn tool and strategically darkened the shadows, especially in the hair flowers. I used the dodge tool to soften the shadow on her cheek from the dangle of fringe.
I then called it DONE! I placed it in a frame and added some market-y text to it and then uploaded it to Pinterest.
