Gemstone photo shoot.

Photo by Jani Miikkulainen

Hello everybody!

I have been so engrossed in painting that everything else pretty much comes second (well except work and photo shoots). I ment to finish this blog post and video a month ago, but inspiration hit me and all I wanted to do was paint. I'm almost finished with my newest painting, and yesterday I finally felt like completing "Gemstone's" video.

Last month I got together with photographer Jani to shoot something "Italian Vogue-sque".
It was another portfolio shoot so we were free to do what we wanted. It took us quite a while to generate ideas, until we finally landed on what you see in the photos. Jani took care of finding the model and studio stuff and I was left with supplying the clothes, styling and doing makeup-hair.
Lucky for me, I had met a designer couple months back, we were interviewing for the same fashion related position. After the group interview she came up to me and handed me her business card. She does a lot of photo shoots too and said it could be cool if we could collaborate sometime. Since I'm such an organized person, I hadn't lost her card =D So once Jani and I had sorted out all the details, I contacted Riikka and asked her if she could join our shoot. Her website http://riikka.fi/ I immediately fell in love with her designs! Her bead and lace work is exquisite!! I told her to be careful because I just might assign her to design me a whole new wardrobe ;) She is such a sweetheart too!

©Jani Miikkulainen 2013

I ran in to some trouble though. Since we wanted our photos to look like they belong in Italian Vogue we needed pretty extravagant accessories! I have quite a nice collection of necklaces and headpieces, but those wouldn't have been enough, we needed more. So I searched for designers and shops in Helsinki that would lend accessories for photo shoots. That was exhausting! Finally I remembered Penny Lane, a second hand vintage shop not too far from Helsinki city centre. After getting the green light from them I went in and picked the accessories I thought would go well with Riikka's clothes and were 'Vogue-sque'. Seriously it took me and Jani like a month to organize this shoot!

©Jani Miikkulainen 2013

I'm not gonna lie, this was an exhausting shoot x_x Because I pretty much had to do all the fashion stuff myself. I did model Anniina's makeup, which took me a while, then after that I did her hair (quite pretty updo) and after that I had to start figuring out how to style her. I hadn't planned anything before hand because I had to see how the clothes and makeup looked first. Of course I needed to consult Jani too whilst styling Anniina. I was pretty exhausted when I finally finished. I had picked a lot of hot pink and black hair accessories from Penny Lane. I had visioned using the black ones with the emerald lace shirt. I'm all in for jewel tones! Black goes really well with pretty much all the jewel tones! All the accessories in Anniina's hair are from Penny Lane, the canary necklace is mine (from ebay) and the earrings were Anniina's. And of course the emerald embroided lace shirt is by Riikka Ikäheimo.

©Jani Miikkulainen 2013

For the last set, I took out all the hair accessories and just put Anniina's hair on a ponytail. I gave her little more blush and red lips. The black embroided lace dress is in Riikka's personal use and not for sale. The emerald shirt was reserved for a buyer.
All in all, I'm very happy how this shoot turned out! The photos are fantastic, Jani is such an artist with a camera. And he's also a photoshop genious! With these pics, we even got 100 likes on this Finnish TFCD-facebook group. I can't remember seen anyone else score 100 likes =D 

That's for it now, you can view the photos on my facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.535800266505999.1073741842.403590549726972&type=3
And here's the link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCVzEIVesUc

Thanks for reading!! I'll be blogging about Japanese Drama CDs next =D 
Take care!!