Working on an assignment with a fabulous Playboy® Playmate could be a photographer’s dream project. I was commissioned to shoot some model for a new website and most of the models for the project were Playmates. Many of them had worked with before but I had not worked or shot with Playboy® Playmate Shannon Stewart, I had always wanted to work with her and now I had the gig to shoot with her.
The shoot was going to be in Las Vegas, Nevada so there was going to be some traveling to the location. At that time, I was just getting into shooting digital and we were still working out the transition from film and what sort of lighting would be best for a down and quick shoot as we did not want to take a lot of gear. I had decided to use tungsten lighting so what I would see is what I would get. I sent one of my guys off the locale hardware store for some shop lights which we could just plugin and move about till I liked what I would see in the camera. This made for an easy set up because we had to move from room to room in a rented house. Once I had the look, I liked we then shot a series of images for a gallery and then move on-to the next look or room.
All these images are from one of the set’s I shot with Shannon in this very sexy net body stocking, the best part about working with a Playmate is they have spent a lot of time In front of the Camera shooting their centerfold and also shooting other Playboy® projects, so they are very well versed in how to pose. The photographers at Playboy® (some time back) really know how to style the girl ‘s into being a Playmate model. I don’t know about these days as Playboy has move to a much larger women’s employee base and all the original photographers are not there anymore and Heff is no longer with us so he is not over seeing what’s going on over there!
How did I light these images? I had two tungsten lights one light was facing the model and one was pointed to the background so that the background was not dark. If I had used a third light, I would have use it for some body or hair separation. However I did use the on-camera flash to be my main light and to also give a catch light in model’s eyes. As you can see from my information of the images my camera was just a Canon 10D very low resolution by today’s standards. These images were only going to be published on the web so super resolution was not needed and this shoot happen in 2004
Working with Shannon Stewart was just as I expected she had many great pose’s and needed just a little encouragement from me. You should always give encouragement to a model on your set. Let them know when they are looking good and you have the look you are going for, be positive and tell the model they look fantastic! Try using a cache phase like “Fabulous baby”.