messing about with Smoke Grenades
Dear friends, the inspiration for this image came from marrying a couple of ideas I’ve been thinking about for some time. Firstly, I’ve always wanted an excuse to let off some coloured smoke grenades (so much fun, I know I’m a pyromaniac at heart) and more recently, I saw some pics of an ice-princess style makeup look that I thought might be fun to try to recreate.
Fans of my photography will know that I quite regularly shoot with Jemima. I find it funny that each time we decide to create something, we seem to push the bar a little higher in terms of technically what we can achieve on our own. The shoots seem to be getting more avant-garde too! It started out with a few pretty conceptual images with an umbrella, then progressed to me covering her face in black makeup, and more recently, submerging the poor girl in a bath of milk! This probably just reflects my journey as a photographer. I really admire high-art/surreal fashion photographers like Miss Aniella (she’s doing a workshop soon, but at £6,000 it’s just a dream, do have a look at her Instagram pics though @surrealfashionart as they’re amazing).
We did the shoot in the sheep paddock. I actually had a little team and few spectators too. Thank you so much to Jayshri & Poppy for doing the makeup and hair, Poppy & Finn for wrangling the smoke and John for helping me with the lights and video. I used a Profoto 4′ octa soft box and Profoto B2 for lights.
We were only able to spray Mima’s hair this time and I know this image would have had a whole deal more impact if her hair was dyed silver, but I still think it’s still a pretty striking and unusual pic. In a world where people flick through images on social media in a fraction of a second, if you gave this pic more than a couple of glances, I guess we did our job!
Photographer: Steve Butler Photography
MUA: Jayshri Butler & Poppy Crawley
Model: Jemima Crawley
Short BTS video of the shoot:
