Pin-up - Minnie McGee

I have been shooting with Minnie fairly regularly for over 3 years now. Over this time we have covered numerous different styles but recently we discussed a pin-up style shoot. 

Minnie is an Artist with a Degree in art, She is very creative and bursting with ideas and very thorough in her preparation for shoots. When we discussed pin-up Minnie went away to get hold of various outfits to compliment the style. 

We have a multitude of backdrops at the studio, however I decided that I would shoot all against white and add the backgrounds later in post processing. Pin-up lends itself to the surreal vivid backgrounds anyway.

First up we have the Cherry Cola shot, Initially had planned to use Coca Cola for this one however in the absence of a glass coke bottle I opted for Fentiman’s Cherry Cola, was quite fitting given the retro styled bottle. I love this image.

We went on to a vintage swimwear set, keeping the bright headscarf (matching the shoes) and going with a yellow top and high waisted bottoms.

This was army themed, hat and outfit match perfectly despite been from different places, we used the fan to get some hair movement and the khaki background was added to give a more traditional pin-up look and feel.

We spoke about the bunnygirl at length, having seen them done a thousand times (and often poorly) we did not want to end up with a tacky image. So with another vintage navy bikini we added the ears, collar and cuff’s finished off with the shoe’s that are too nice to wear outside. Overall I am pretty pleased with the resulting image and think it has remained tasteful.

In continuance of the earlier military theme we went with a pilot’s outfit. Retained the white background for this one just to help the blue pop out a little. To add a further vintage feel we enlisted the help og Rose & Boo Vintage Crokery Hire and got hold of a cup and saucer.

The final pinup image was the sailor outfit, the background is a little vivid for pinup but I went with it because I didn’t want to have to mute the blue in the outfit. 

This one was pretty much an outtake however I love the mood it captures, Minnie is great to work with and are shoots are always fun and productive and look forward to working with her again in the spring of 2017.

The images were all shot wit similar lighting, key light camera right with a long strip box camera left and an overhead softbox clipping the model from above and illuminating the background.

I will post a further blog post in due course with a video tutorial on how I edited the Cherry Cola shot, from RAW file to the final edit.

I hope you enjoyed this post, if you want to follow Minnie on Instagram you can do so here and if you want to see more of Minnie’s artwork check out here.