Your Best Portraits

This image was inspired by an early 20th century illustration of Ceres, the goddess of harvest. Originally I was going to just pile wheat stalks to create the bottom of a skirt, but my stylist pretty much demanded that we actually recreate the dress. This meant creating a corset of wheat stalks, which we sewed by hand, one by one to a simple white dress. Turns out that wheat splinters are an actual thing, so this was a pretty excruciating process. Since we wanted the image itself to feel like an illustration, we created a plaster covered backdrop that had the tones of aged paper. Out shoot day turned out to be too beautiful to be stuck inside a studio, so we decided to do our shoot outside, using the sun as our main light, and a large softbox camera right as fill for the harsh shadows. Post processing was minimal, we needed to clean up some of the wheat stalks that had slipped out of their stitching, increase contrast and lighten up the blacks to give it the feel of the original.