The Stellar Studios team recently completed a two-day campaign shoot for the beloved makeup brand, Avon Philippines. The shoot was centered around highlighting the brand’s top picks for emulating the #glassskin trend—a makeup aesthetic characterized by radiant, glowing skin that looks natural and healthy in any light. Combining this ‘my skin but better’ finish with natural, rosy hues, the Avon makeup products come together for a stunning portrait of fresh-faced beauty on the model that was to be used for marketing material by the advertising agency, Long Story Short Story across the Southeast Asia region.
Crafting beauty campaigns is a highly technical job that requires plenty of skill and experience, so it was only fitting that our senior photographer and founder Rebecca van Ommen stepped up to the plate to lead the charge. Being a beauty campaign, the concepts that we created involved careful composition planning, as well as plenty of flying elements and careful consideration on how to highlight the products on the models faces.
Here at Stellar Studios, we wish to promote a culture of paying it forward and sharing our knowledge with fellow photographers and practitioners in the field. Below are some practices that we applied during our shoot. Hopefully, you can use these tips when creating a beauty campaign or shooting photos that highlight a specific beauty product!
1. Fill in the Space
Don’t be afraid to flood the space and subject with light in order to capture details at the microscopic level. When it comes to beauty shoots, capturing the texture of the products laying on the skin as well as the color accuracy of pigmented items on your model’s lips, lids, and cheeks is a big deal. This extra step can make up for what strategic sculpting and detailing cannot do. Filling your space is what will give customers an idea of how the product might look on their skin too!
2. Plan out Your Composition
For studio beauty shoots, it pays to plan out your final compositions ahead of time. Determine your main source of light, as well as its temperature. Taking the time to plan out your composition makes it easier for you to properly lift the product from your captured shots out into its new layout. This also guarantees that all of your shots have consistent lighting and feel, no matter which ones the layout artist will opt to use.
3. Retouching is Enhancing
Do not be afraid of retouching your photos for fear of losing their rawness, especially when it comes to capturing beauty products. Retouching photos is all about enhancing what is already there, so we tapped our photo retouching arm, the Paper Boat Creative, to work their magic with real-time photo retouching on all of the layouts to see if the lighting and mood were unified.
We hope that these three tips will help you with your own beauty shoots and campaigns. Our campaign for Avon Beauty would not have been possible if not for the following people:
Advertising Agency: Long Story Short Story
Account Director: Anca Bautista
Creative Director: Lec Flores
Art Director: Elvin Julian
Photographer: Rebecca van Ommen
Photo Studio: Stellar Studios
Photo Retouching: Paper Boat Creative Sneak a peek at the shoot with some of our favorite snapshots from those hectic two days!