Fig. 1: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
Okay, I might be more into beauty than I thought.
You know when you’re walking around town and you take pictures on your phone and you wish you could have taken that photo on your camera instead but it’s too heavy to carry around? No? Just me then. Moving on.
I have a standard Nikon SLR camera with the 18-55mm kit lens and that’s just bulky and heavy to carry. So I asked the photo unit for advise and they recommended a 50mm fixed lens. Long story short – I spent the early hours of Saturday morning taking lots of pictures of my makeup.
Fig. 2: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
I started out very simple. Picked out some products from my makeup bag with a similar colour palette and set them up on a tiny marble slab (Look on the right, you’ll see more about how much I love white marble). Threw the pictures onto my laptop and experimented with some very basic editing.
Fig. 3: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
For the first few shots I increase the amount of light, warmth and vividness of the colours.
Fig. 4: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
Following which I added more light and I didn’t have to increase the saturation of the colours. Although I tried to maintain the level of warmth so that I don’t end up with a blue image.
Fig. 5: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
I tried something new with this one, I attempted to capture the shot through its reflection in a mirror, although maybe I need to try this one again with a bigger mirror. I feel like when I look at this one, I focus more on the copper plate behind the actual mirror. Not the happiest with this one.
Fig. 6: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
On this one above, I went all out! Extra light, extra warmth and a huge increase in saturation, and I’m actually quite happy with how this turned out. Maybe softer tones aren’t so bad.
Fig. 7: Personal makeup items. Personal photograph by the author. 6 October, 2018.
The last couple shots I decided to change the background and see how that affects the image. I ended up with cooler tones and I think it makes it difficult to edit, because anything I did, only made the white of the magazine pages look more grey. For these ones, I settled with just increasing the light by a little and leaving it at that.
