I categorize myself as a product, conceptual, and lifestyle photographer. My specialization is the surreal retouching style, not the topic genre. So, I wanted to create a miniseries that showed how my style translates from still life products to model work.
An aspect of this project that I wasn't anticipating was the cinemagraphs. I'm always trying to find new ways to dip my toes into motion and incorporate movement into my portfolio. I had thought the post processing would be too complex to bring this into the motion world (without use of cgi), but as I was shooting the still life studio images I watched the dripping and realized I could probably experiment with only animating the drips. This would allow me to still do my complex retouching on the still sections that blend the slime with the products.
For personal projects, I'm frequently going back to this visual of surreal distortion- dripping, melting, gooey, shiny, etc. My Juicy Watches series was the first good example of me coming into this style. So, I brainstormed some new ways of elevating that concept. Let's keep it in the fashion genre, instead of cutting the product in half let's melt and distort the actual product, and let's throw in a crystal clear object to challenge myself even more. So, how do I melt a clear glass bottle or shiny opaque purse without actually melting them? SLIME. Perfect! All that's left to do is color/dye it to match the products (food coloring for translucent objects and paint for opaque objects).
I paired up with local model Sommer, who gave tons of input on positioning and expressions that really brought these shots to another level. She also works behind the camera as a photographer, so being able to speak in shorthand essentially back and forth with her made this shoot smooth as butter!
And speaking of smooth, we brought on Kem Mendez who created this insane dewey glow on Sommer. It really highlights her skin and again brings this project up to the next level. I can't speak enough about the value of collaborating.
Overall it's another fun and unique project down in the books and it took very little budget and time to pull together. These are the projects I love, the ones that require ingenuity and creative problem solving. Keep an eye out for the next one!
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