Black and Gold
If you were to take a look at my Pinterest, you would see two similar boards. One labeled “Future photo shoot inspirations”, and the other “Glitter photo shoot ideas”. The common factor in both? Gold. Lots of gold makeup, gold flakes, gold glitter, gold crowns, gold dresses, etc. I have been itching to do a gold themed shoot for a while, but I couldn’t quite piece it all together until I found the right person for it. Cue the part time job I got during the summer, and in walks Paige, a friend from high school whom I hadn’t seen in a few years. It was like love at first sight. Her curly hair, her pale skin and high cheek bones. I knew she would make the perfect muse for this photo shoot! I began to picture the make up I would do and the type of outfit she could wear—even before I asked her to model. Luckily, living in a small town does have its perks from time to time. Meaning that I had already taken pictures of Paige before for her senior pictures. Plus she knows I do these fun creative sessions periodically. So of course she was game.
Now I know I had mentioned before how I was starting to piece everything together. But I couldn’t quite piece out the details. That is until I heard a song on the radio that brought my idea out into focus. It was “You Should See Me In A Crown” by Billie Eilish. It was the first time I had ever heard the song, and it just helped bring my fantasy to life as I was listening to it. (Which, I HIGHLY recommend listening to that song, if you can, while going through the rest of these photos. You’ll see what I mean—it’s just so fitting!) But that song made me realize that I needed more to this shoot than just gold flakes and a black and gold dress. I needed claws, a sun burst style crown, and some type of feathery cape. I ordered the dress off of Macy’s (pricey, but my logic and reasoning is that I can reuse for other shoots and events), the feather shawl and crown (which is made of zip-ties, how awesome and creative is that?!) off of Esty, and the claws, gold flakes and glitter gel/adhesive I bought off of Amazon.
The most fun that I had with this shoot was doing the make up. I had this outrageous idea of having Paige go eyebrow-less. Paige was nervous about being without her eyebrows, so I made a deal with her that we would do a trial run first to see if the look was better with, or without brows. Not to mention it was also my first time ever to glue down eyebrows, so I definitely needed to practice. We were both pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. Well, Paige was. I knew she could pull it off! Once the brows were off, I just pulled the eye-shadow out more around, lightly brushed the lashes with some mascara, and finished the base of the look with some Trophy Wife highlighter, and a dark navy lipstick. After that was complete, I got to have some fun and put the gold flakes on.
I asked Cara to join us because I knew she would have fun with this styled session. Plus I would be moving to California in a few weeks after. We spent just about 2 hours photographing around Letchworth State Park, one of my favorite places to photograph. With the bare trees and lack of foliage, it really added to the dark vibes of this shoot. I’m so glad we were able to do this before I moved!
~Rachel
After
being cooped up in my editing cave for months, not doing anything new creatively, I was so glad that Rachel pushed me to get out and make something new, even if it was freezing out and only a few days before Christmas. I don’t get to get out and take creative portraits very often, so this was welcome to my burnt out brain. And I think the outcome speaks for itself - Rache'l’s styling was so good! Hope you enjoy my photographic take on this session!
Cara
