BTS: Paper

One of our favorite photographers, Diane Villadsen recently started a Facebook group that has already become a thriving community. It’s been really fun to “meet” other photographers who have similar goals and to share struggles and successes. We have especially enjoyed the photo challenges that Diane has been posting. We wanted to make time to do more shoots just for fun this year and these challenges are a great way for us to meet that goal and shoot things that we might not have thought of on our own.

The first challenge was to shoot using paper as a prop. Paper can add so much to a shoot and it is cheap and fairly easy to work with. We used paper in our shoot for Volition Beauty a few months ago, but we wanted to play around with using it with a model.

We found our poster board at Michael’s. I was surprised by how many different colors they had. I usually need white so I hadn’t really paid attention to the other colors in the past. We asked our friend Kendall to model for us. She has an amazing closet and we used the clothing that she brought as inspiration for the paper shapes. The biggest challenges were cutting out the shapes and then keeping the paper from bending with the wind. Arabela ended up having to smooth out the shapes a little in photoshop.

Here are some BTS images from the day. You can read our interview with Diane here, and see the final images from this shoot here.