Rebekah Shibao – Shoot Notes.

As you may know; I’ve been working on shooting in my studio more often and so I’ve been of course inviting beautiful ladies over to shoot and Rebekah was one of them. I shot with her the same day that I photographed McKenzie Lynn.

I think that Rebekah reached out to our High Speed Magazine profile on Instagram; and expressed an interest in shooting for the magazine. We had the opportunity to chat a bit back and forth via the platform.

I invited her to come and shoot with me just for what I was expecting to use for making some photography tutorial videos for my YouTube channel. Well unfortunately that wasn’t able to happen as I didn’t have an extra set of hands to run any video. However we got some great photos regardless.

Since my beauty dish broke and I haven’t replaced it yet I was left using my 72″ Octabox. The last time I used it was during our shoot at Mountain High Ski Resort with Barbara Palacios and Cloris Lounges.

I had told Rebekah that I wanted to shoot some Tom Ford inspired shots, just to see if I could actually pull it off. I don’t know that I did it right but we got some great shots to say the least. But then it’s near impossible to get a bad shot of Rebekah.

First up we did some beauty looks to warm up like the image below.

I had the light on the lowest power setting which for these lights is 400ws. The box was set a bit away from her and she was about six feet away from the seamless backdrop.

I tend to feel that I had the softbox too close to Rebekah but it got me that sort of gray background.

iso 50  f/5.6  SS 125

Then we moved to the outside of the studio to pick up the below shots. I always feel much better about shooting outside of a studio. Even in a bedroom or kitchen or bathroom; which I know sounds ridiculous but a studio always seems to just make my brain shut down.

So we went outside to shoot. By then we’d really built some synergy which really got things rolling. Rebekah is able to emote on command; but then again she is an actress who is starting to do some modeling.

Since we were outside the sun could have become my main light. We however were under a patio cover so instead I killed much of the ambient light with a 1/180 shutter speed and relied on my 72″ Octa to produce the light.

Her energy is contagious and really exciting to say the least.

We ended up back in the house to get a couple of additional looks and one of them was an attempt at some Tom Ford inspired concepts. His brand does amazing stuff with his purses and handbag line featuring nude models.

I grabbed one of the Epiphanie leather camera bags I was sent and handed it to Rebekah and well above is one of the images we got to create.

In terms of my original idea; I don’t think that I got it right this go round but it was fun and we did come away with some decent images. Rebekah of course in spite of my failings did wonderfully. Don’t you agree?

The key is that I just need to start shooting in my studio a lot more just to get in practice again of shooting in the studio.

Hair & Make Up: Gabriella Simmons